Review: TROUBLE IN MIND Speaks Inconvenient Truths at Pittsburgh Public Theater

It's a very good play about a very bad play. That's the capsule version of what you'll see at Justin Emeka's production of Alice Childress's once-controversial Trouble in Mind. Though written in 1955, the mix of seriousness and satire in the piece feels shockingly contemporary, both in terms of its subject matter and in terms of its tone and structure. To use contemporary vernacular, this is a play dissecting two very 2020s theoretical concepts: performative allyship, and wokeness. 

It's late in the 1950s, and the Civil Rights movement is underway. An integrated cast has been assembled on Broadway by director Al Manners (Joseph McGranaghan) to perform a new play, a tragedy about the effects of racism. Unfortunately, only the black actors seem to notice that the play is not only badly written, but is condescending, outdated and so stuffed with tropes of minstrelsy and antebellum cliche that it feels like the 1850s, not the 1950s. Veteran actress Wiletta Mayer (Shinnerrie D. Jackson) tries to keep her head down and cash her checks, but the mounting pressures of the events in the news, the racial tensions in the rehearsal room, and a play that just keeps getting worse scene by scene finally mount until she has to do something. But what can she do? She is, after all, just an ex-showgirl with no political or industry power... except her voice and her fearlessness.

Justin Emeka is, thankfully, playing with fire here: this is loaded material and he doesn't once shy away from the intensity, awkwardness and incendiary qualities of this work. What surprised me the most, however, was the level of comedy, both dark and broad, that Emeka's direction brought to the show. Reading the show on paper, the script is dark; there's not a lot of laughs in its comparatively lighter first half, but Emeka finds the comedy, both situational and physical, in the play and squeezes it out moment by moment. There are big belly laughs to be had, and the way they gradually peter out as we move into the heavier second half is a masterful shooing out of the clowns. 

Shinnerrie D. Jackson anchors the entire show as Wiletta, filling in the character's complexities and contradictions with a deep sense of grounding and self-preservation. This is, after all, a character who we meet encouraging serious black actor/academic John (Vandous Stripling II) to play the fool for the white people in the industry. Her advice seems to run counter to nearly a century of black liberation, exceptionalism and pride, with her encouraging John to play dumb, laugh a lot, deny his training and education and essentially be a stereotype. But then, we meet stage regular Sheldon Forrester (Garbie Dukes), the living embodiment of every cliche and stereotype that Wiletta encouraged John to take on. Sheldon has had a long career, despite either playing the fool or being a fool. Dukes finds great complexities in this seemingly simplistic comedic figure during the second half; is Sheldon ignorant, is he playing ignorant, or is he lampooning and subverting ignorance? Dukes's Sheldon makes a great foil to Stripling's performance as John, whose refusal to carry water for these old tropes and cliches of blackness sometimes comes across as a different kind of appeasement. As the show goes on, Stripling takes on a few of the worldly, flamboyant bon vivant traits of his white director, leading to a rather chilling moment in which his body language, gestures and choices of words eerily mimic the director, like he's become a puppet.

There's a lot to talk about in the white contingent, most of all Joseph McGranaghan's portrayal of Manners. When I began this review by talking about performative allyship and wokeness, that discussion centers in on Manners, and centers in HARD. In McGranaghan's hands, Manners is a cipher, forever leaving us teetering between "he's trying to be a good ally and a progressive, but doesn't really know what he's doing" and "he's a bigot and a tyrant, a wolf in sheep's clothing using civil rights issues as a vehicle for his own career." McGranaghan's Manners runs his rehearsal room the way a television chef runs a restaurant kitchen: cajoling and issuing out praise one minute, doling out abuse and criticism and unreasonable mind games the next. He's not a good, safe person, it's easy to tell, but McGranaghan leaves us guessing scene to scene as to whether Manners is misguided or thorougly corrupt. Like a prescient commentary on rage-monster creatives like Stanley Kubrick and Scott Rudin, Manners is one of the most unlikeable characters imaginable, and McGranaghan gives JUST enough reason to believe this person isn't universally despised and boycotted. 

Manners has brough with him two white actors to fill the role of landowner and southern belle: soap opera actor Bill O'Wray (Daniel Krell) and rising ingenue Judy Sears (Emma Brown Baker). They're both milquetoasts: Bill tries his hardest to be absolutely apolitical and take no sides or stances, while Judy has a vague idea of the right things to say and opinions to hold, but just parrots them without strong conviction or point of view. Krell and Baker aren't playing roles as toxic as McGranaghan, but they also give us equal reason to feel for and against their characters. We have moments of sympathy for them, but also a distaste that borders on disgust: it's like there's a bomb in the room, and Bill has turned to look the other way while Judy simply keeps repeating "oh no, a bomb." These aren't monsters, though, and neither actor portrays them withotu a certain level of warmth: Bill has a gentle, fatherly energy and his desire to nurse his ulcer and avoid the stresses of a celebrity out in public are understandable, while Judy's pro-integration can-doism and "don't see color" egalitarianism probably WAS progressive for her time, though not so much for ours. But there's bringing a knife to a gunfight, and then there's bringing HUGS to a gunfight. 

The smaller, more overtly comedic roles go to a Pittsburgh institution and a rising Pittsburgh star: Anthony Marino, fresh from Young Frankenstein at CLO, and Martin Giles, fresh from, oh, EVERYTHING. They both play Manners's underlings: Giles the aging, half-deaf and half-senile doorman-slash-gofer, Marino the young and enthusiastic stage manager. Much of the broadest comedy in the piece comes from these two roles, though the comedy tapers off as we move into the second half. These two loveable performers make these roles loveable as much as laughable. When we first meet them, Giles's Henry is an almost vaudevillian cliche of the doddering old Irishman, while Marino's Eddie is textbook goofy nerd, all bubbling enthusiasm and ineptitude. We laugh at them, because these are stock characters we are always intended to laugh at... and then we see how Manners belittles, abuses and dominates these two relatively powerless people, and the laughter becomes a little less easy. Both of them get moments of drama amidst all the comedy, primarily as the time in the rehearsal hall's dense and toxic atmosphere begins to weigh on them and their initial ebullience melts away.

As much as the piece feels like an ensemble, by the end of Act 2, it's Wiletta's story and Shinnerrie D. Jackson's play... or at least a duel between her and McGranaghan's Manners. Jackson's mounting impatience, frustration and righteous rage against both the play and Manners finally reach a breaking point when Wiletta realizes just how bad and unhelpful the play really is. Here, Childress's text and Emeka's direction take a very interesting turn: while not exactly breaking the fourth wall or engaging in Brechtian techniques, we clearly have pivoted from "this is about the bad play" to "this is about THIS play," with Jackson no longer exactly playing Wiletta, but essentially becoming Alice Childress and talking about the struggles of black artists in the macro and about Trouble in Mind, specifically, in the micro. (If you've studied your theatre history, you may know Trouble in Mind did not receive an uncensored Broaday production until less than a decade ago, and was repeatedly held back and rewritten as Childress struggled with censorship and disinterest from the largely white theatrical establishment.) This Wiletta/Childress dualism is suggested further by projections and video elements in the preshow and post-show of Childress herself. It takes an intensely powerful presence but a deeply nuanced performer to handle this kind of metafictional dialectic posturing, and Shinnerrie D. Jackson makes it look, not easy exactly, but intensely natural, inevitable and just plain right.

Trouble in Mind raises issues we are still grappling with today, and perhaps some that we haven't grappled with at all yet. Is there really such a thing as positive allyship? Can the still largely white establishment grapple with racial and social issues without either putting its foot in its mouth or making things worse? All the issues people raise with "the bad play" remind me of the current discussion on Hairspray in a post-Obama, post-BLM world. (This is not me saying Hairspray is a bad or problematic piece; I happen to think it's a small masterpiece, albeit one whose tongue-in-cheek elements sometimes clash with its progressive instincts.) Whose voices are being raised, and are the people in those works being depicted accurately, compassionately and with nuance? Maybe what's required, in all things, is a serious examination not just of intentions but of quality, and an elevation of voices who know what they're genuinely talking about from lived experience. That takes work, work that the fictional Al Manners and his fictional playwright have clearly not done- but it's work that the Public, Justin Emeka, and his cast have clearly done. As Childress writes in the play (the real play, not the fictional one), "go further. Do better." The Public has, and is, and God willing, still will.

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