Making good TROUBLE at Fells Point Corner Theatre
November 3, 1955. Actor-turned-playwright Alice Childress enjoys the off-Broadway premiere of her new play, Trouble in Mind. at the Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York City. Using a play-within-a-play structure, in which a multi-racial and multi-generational company of actors rehearse a well-meaning melodrama aimed at stirring audience sympathy for the brewing civil rights movement, Childress puts on stage and in full view the personal, professional, and political challenges she and her peers face as they try to move forward in theater–and to move theater forward.
In 1955, that included not only the dramatic hurdles the characters confront as they try to navigate between art and business, integrity and accommodation, but also the real-life obstacles the playwright herself wrestled with in getting her work on stage. And then, in a truly infamous moment of art-imitating-life, she found herself confronting an eerie echo of the very dilemma she had written into her play, when she had to decide what compromise was worth making to get to Broadway.
For the play met with tremendous enthusiasm when it opened at the celebrated progressive theater downtown, and plans soon got underway for a transfer to Broadway. Until the producers decided that the Great White Way of the 1950s wasn’t ready for all the unsparing and hard-hitting truths in Childress’s play, nor for its ambiguously complicated ending. They insisted she revise and rewrite to create a softer, clearer, happier resolution; she resisted, and ultimately refused. The producers pulled the production, the transfer never happened, and the play had to wait until 2021 to make its Broadway debut.
Exactly 70 years later, little about the play, the issues it raises, and the challenges facing its characters seems to have disappeared. As Childress’s equally hilarious and heartbreaking work gets a timely revival in Baltimore at Fells Point Corner Theatre from November 7 – 30, one of the production’s acting company, who plays the central role of Wiletta Mayer, took time out of tech rehearsals to share her thoughts on the role and the play. It was a pleasure to welcome Kay-Megan Washington for her first time on WBJC–you can hear our conversation here:
Tickets and more information are at http://www.fpct.org
