It marks the first opportunity for Wiletta Mayer, an African American actress who has spent years in parts beneath her intelligence and talent, to play a leading lady. As the company begins its work, Wiletta and the white director clash over her take on the role. Set along the fault lines of the early Civil Rights movement, Trouble in Mind offers a disturbing and disarmingly funny look at the half-truths we tell ourselves about race relations and progress in America.

Childress’s drama was a critical and popular success from the beginning of its run Off-Broadway at the Greenwich Mews Theatre in 1955. Her first play to be presented outside the auspices of the American Negro Theatre in Harlem, it immediately drew the interest from producers seeking a Broadway run. But in an ironic twist echoing the tribulations of the characters in the play itself, the producers wanted changes to the script to make it more palatable to a commercial audience. Childress refused to compromise her artistic vision, and the play never ransferred, ending her chances of being the first African American woman playwright to have a work produced on Broadway. (Two years later that honor would go to Lorraine Hansberry for A Raisin in the Sun.) Trouble in Mind received a well-reviewed revival Off-Broadway in 1998 by the Negro Ensemble Company and was produced under the direction of Irene Lewis at Baltimore’s CENTERSTAGE in February 2007.

Alice Childress (1916-1994) was an actress, director, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, essayist, and activist. Born Louise Henderson in Charleston, South Carolina, in October, 1916 (though some sources, probably beginning with Childress herself, claim it was 1920), Alice Childress was raised in Harlem by her grandmother Eliza, herself the daughter of a freed slave. A failed marriage to actor Alvin Childress, famous as one of the television stars of Amos ‘n’ Andy, provided her with her professional name. She was a founding member of the American Negro Theatre in Harlem, which staged her early plays Florence and Just a Little Simple (based on the famous Langston Hughes character). In 1965 Childress wrote Wedding Band, which had its first major staging in 1972 at the New York Shakespeare Festival in a production co-directed by Childress and Joseph Papp. Today, she is best known for her novel for youth, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich, about a 13-year-old heroin addict. Childress herself wrote the screenplay for the 1978 film starring Cicely Tyson.