by Caroline Abide, Contributing Writer
BILOXI (GG) — For the second play of its 79th season, Biloxi Little Theatre presented Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress directed by Eric Funches. The curtain was up as the audience found their seats, revealing what looked like an unfinished set. Upon closer examination, I saw that the set was actually arranged to look like the backstage of a theatre, complete with its own exit and dressing rooms. This hinted at the meta nature of the play, which is about a group of actors, some Black, some white, who have been cast in a play called “Chaos in Belleville.” In the first scene, veteran actress Wiletta, played by Michelle Brown, is the first to arrive for rehearsal.
She is greeted by Henry, the Irish doorman (played by Tim Pulver) remembers her from a past show they worked on decades ago, where she performed surrounded by rainbow lights. This memory and her reverence for the theatre is undercut by the realization that she is a black woman in a particular time (1957), in a particular place (the United States of America), meaning that she can only be cast in particular kinds of roles.
Within the constraints of what the industry will allow her to do, she has gone far. She has learned to be accommodating to white folks – she instructs her castmate John Nevins, an up and coming young man from her hometown played by Dwayne Durgan, to always agree with what the white director says and to laugh at anything that might possibly be construed as a joke, even if he doesn’t find it funny.
The play-within-a-play structure allows each character to inhabit the racial archetypes of the past while their “off stage” interactions intimate the performative nature of all human relationships wherein different power dynamics are at play. Judy Sears (played with excellent comedic timing by Bailey Smith), a naïve white actress fresh from Yale’s drama program, becomes friendly with her Black co-stars even as she is playing the Southern daughter of a sharecropper.
Although she may align herself with her newfound friends, her race allows her the benefit of playing a more central, sympathetic character, the damself in distress. The play urges the audience to consider what is left beneath the superficial social scripts that we all use either to get ahead in life or simply survive. The accommodating actions of the older Black generation, including Wiletta and Sheldon Forrester (played by Tyrone Bowers) are juxtaposed with those of the up-and-coming young adults, who are less inclined to ingratiate themselves to whiteness.
The irony is that perhaps the new generation owes their seat at the table to their elders’ sacrifice of dignity. Unfortunately, that was the only way for a black actor to get their foot in the door in the first half of the twentieth century. The characters wrestle with the question of whether its worth it to be in a production that is inherently dehumanizing when that is currently the only option that will put them on stage.
There’s something encouraging about seeing these local actors bring Alice Childress’s story to life. At the time of its writing Trouble in Mind was in direct response to the state of professional theatre: Childress wrote it in 1955, based on her own experiences as an actor.
Today, we don’t bat an eye at stories that center complex Black characters like Wiletta. This sense of progress was evident as I watched one of the younger Black actors, Kasi Farver playing Millie, speak with a confidence and vibrancy that previous generations could not have countenanced, in front of a receptive Mississippi audience no less. And yet, the material remains timely. The leaps and bounds that American society has made toward racial equality in the past fifty years since the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 makes it possible to feel like these are issues of a distant past, that racial reconciliation is complete.
But representation is only as good as the folks it claims to represent say it is. In Trouble in Mind, the play-within-the-play is directed by Al Manners, a condescending, manipulative white man (played by Mitchell Herrin) who believes he gets a pass due to the fact that he’s willing to direct a play that includes black characters at all.
Contemporary films featuring Black characters too often exist through the lens of the white gaze, that is, told by people who have never experienced that particular kind of disenfranchisement. A few examples come to mind: The Blindside, The Help, Hidden Figures, Green Book. These are films that were lauded for their inclusiveness, often achieving high honors at the Academy Awards, while also being derided by minority groups for their reductionist portrayals of Black characters. They also were all written and directed by white people.
The trouble with claiming another group’s experience is that it presumes an authority over that which is not personal. In Trouble in Mind, this results in Wiletta being asked to portray a Black mother who acts as no mother would act: she gives up her son to a lynch mob with apparent indifference because she “doesn’t know any better.” This is the final straw for an actress who has been belittled for her entire career. Her resulting outburst brings the tensions between white and Black castmates to a head and halts the production indefinitely. No one is happy with the outcome, yet everyone is saved from the pernicious effects of perpetuating predictable stereotypes.
In the aftermath, Wiletta is left alone backstage, commiserating with Henry about how her experience of being pidgeonholed as a Black actress has tarnished her dream of becoming a serious performer. He encourages her to get on stage then and perform something grand for him, an audience of one. Wiletta recites from Psalm 133, starting with “Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell in unity…”
In Brown’s recitation, the emotion seeps through; she sobs through the august verse, imbuing it with a deep sense of tragedy, alluding at the distance between this ideal and reality. At the height of her breakdown, her weeping transforms into laughter, bringing to the fore a disbelief in the absurdity of it all. The laughter functions as both a defense and a remedy: you laugh so you don’t cry.
In this case, the leading lady has had enough, though the production may continue on without her. This highlights the collective loss that we experience as a society when we allow such injustice to occur. In not creating space for Black actors to embody the full range of their humanity, we lose the opportunity to experience their talent. Maybe they give up on the industry, thinking that it isn’t ready for them.
This is critical considering that art is a kind of snapshot of society – what it believes and who has a voice. Cultural beliefs shape real-life attitudes.
The antidote is stories like this one: representation of a community on its own terms.
(Photo by Caroline Abide/The Gazebo Gazette)
