The Art of Artifice

Sections

Neighborhoods

Features

NHI Newsletter

Legal Notices

Some Favorite Sites

Government/ Community Links

by christopher grobe | Nov 5, 2007 6:18 pm

Commenting has been closed | E-mail the Author

Posted to: Arts

Merely to walk into the Yale Repertory Theater these days is a dizzying experience. Covering the brick walls at the rear end of the stage are huge panels of fake brick. A few feet in from the theater’s wall-mounted catwalk is a temporary catwalk mounted to a fake-brick wall. Even the steps down from the stage into the audience lead not to the theater’s house-floor but to a slightly raised platform—a fake house-floor.

This meticulous imitation of a 1950s theater, Michael Locher’s set for Trouble in Mind, conveys nothing so strongly as the sheer, ponderous waste of theatrical artifice. It is infuriating, really. Real brick walls were only a paint scraper away! The theater’s catwalks needed only a bit of a paint-treatment and a heap of rope to conform to the period! The thought of this is bewildering—and I suppose that’s the point.

Trouble in Mind, a fascinating 1955 play by Alice Childress about a mixed-race cast rehearsing a racially loaded play, expresses precisely this mixture of fury and confusion toward the mannered artifice of 1950s race relations. (Childress even names the white director of the play-within-the-play Al Manners.) All in all, the doubletalk of the play’s characters, as they bury their true convictions under layers of denial and diffidence, is meant to be as unsettling as this production’s vertiginous set.

As the play begins, two African-American actors, Wiletta Mayer and John Nevins, arrive for the first day of rehearsal for a Broadway show. Within minutes, Wiletta, the jaded veteran of the stage, is giving John instruction on his role—not his role in the play, but his role as a “Negro” in the white-dominated world of Broadway. “Laugh, laugh at everything they say,” she advises him.

As the rest of the cast and crew filter onstage for the rehearsal, it becomes clear that they have all learned their roles quite well, whether or not they are aware of playing them. The African-American cast members joke about the stereotypical roles they play—Wiletta plays jewels (Crystal, Pearl, Opal), her coworker Millie plays flowers (Gardenia, Magnolia, Chrysantheum), and they are all well-versed in the wailing of spirituals and the quavering delivery of slave-speak. But for reasons of finances, ambition, or mere inertia, none of them can bring themselves to get too riled up about these limitations. Sure, they mention in passing the ongoing bus boycotts in Alabama, but that world of defiance and resolve seems a million miles away. Over the course of the play, though, the facade of complacence slowly crumbles.

Director Irene Lewis has assembled a fine bunch of actors and, more importantly, has created out of them a tight-knit ensemble. The brio of their fast-paced interactions is downright infectious, but it never completely sugars over the conflicts that arise amongst the cast members. The overall feeling is one of a constant masquerade punctuated by brief yet poignant slips of the mask. In this, Ms. Lewis has matched well Childress’s own light touch.

E. Faye Butler, as Wiletta, makes a compelling transformation from a calculating masquerader to a passionate objector. In particular, the look on her face when she realizes that she has inadvertently quoted her stereotypical character’s lines gives us a glimpse into a very troubled mind indeed. Another standout performance is Daren Kelly’s turn as Bill O’Wray, the distinguished white actor who suddenly loses his self-assurance when Al Manners warns him that his attitude toward his fellow cast-members appears racist. Mr. Kelly’s performance is by no means showy, but cropping up around the edges of the play, his O’Wray is a fascinating study in flailing self-consciousness.

At times, the play feels dated, not so much for the content but for the style. In a play about manners and artifice, our glimpses below the surface must offer a base-level standard of artlessness. Nowadays, mostly due to the influence of film and television, we have exacting standards of naturalism on the stage that didn’t yet exist in Childress’s time. So, for instance, when Judy Sears, the play’s white ingenue bursts out, in a moment of revelation, “You’re a puppet. With strings attached!” it seems more silly than revelatory. To a twenty-first century eye, Childress’s usually light touch gives way, here, to poeticized heavy-handedness. Similarly, an older actor’s story of witnessing a lynching rings false due to a constructedness inconsistent with this story’s role as an emotionally raw wake-up call to Wiletta.

All in all, though, this play is more significant for its surprising contemporaneity than its occasional datedness. Irene Lewis and the Yale Repertory Theatre have done well to breathe new life into this neglected classic of the American theater.

Comments

There were no comments

New Haven Independent

New Haven Independent Login Form