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Authorship, Authority, Authenticity, Archive: The Case of Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind | JHUP Theatre
For most of its life in the theatre, Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind has existed primarily as a text. It was published in a series of anthologies that sought to recuperate underrepresented voices in US theatre: first, in Lindsay Patterson’s 1971 Black Theater: A 20th Century Collection of the Work of Its Best Playwrights, and then in Darwin T. Turner’s 1994 edition of Black Drama in America: An Anthology and Judith E. Barlow’s 1994 Plays by American Women: 1930-1960.[1] Following its 1955 premiere production off-Broadway at the Greenwich Mews Theatre, Trouble in Mind was produced sporadically, primarily at theatres dedicated to producing the work of Black playwrights—such as a 1979 New York City production at Woodie King Jr.’s New Federal Theatre, a 1984 Chicago production by the Kuumba Theatre Company, the play’s 1992 UK premiere at London’s Tricycle Theatre, and a 1998 production by the Negro Ensemble Company—to accompany occasional stagings on university and college campuses. Recently, it has received renewed attention amid the wider recuperation of Alice Childress as a major 20th-century Black playwright, including: productions at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2007 and 2019; a 2010 production at the Aurora Theatre Company in Berkeley, California; a 2011 production by Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.; a 2011 production by Center Stage in Baltimore, Maryland; a 2016 production at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota; a 2017 production at the Theatre Royal Bath; and its much-belated arrival on Broadway at the Roundabout Theatre in 2021.[2] This recent flurry of productions notwithstanding, for roughly 50 years prior to its Broadway premiere (which the New York Times called, “66 years late and still on time”), Trouble in Mind was circulated, read, imagined, analyzed, and critiqued predominantly as a text—as a literary object produced by an author—rather than as a play to be produced onstage.[3] Its textual life has exerted a strong though unacknowledged influence on the imagination and interpretation of the play. My essay “Alice Childress’s Troubling Method: Theatrical ‘Truth’ and the Cold War Politics of Rehearsing Racial Authenticity” (published in Theatre Journal vol. 77, no. 2) seeks to remediate the general overemphasis on Trouble in Mind as a textual object by attending more fully to Childress’s career as a theatre practitioner, her vision for a Black “people’s theatre,” and her communist activism as integral to her dramaturgy.[4] This historiographical project requires not only a turn to the material archive but also a reflexive engagement with archive, text, and context that invites reconsideration of prevailing narratives and conventional wisdom about the play and its history.
