Kudtarkar.
Alice Childress’ best-known play, Trouble in Mind, — a hard-hitting study of racism in American theater, being put on by the Yale School of Drama at the University Theater from Feb. 2 to Feb. 8 — debuted in 1955. The play’s critical success made Childress the first African American woman to win an Obie as a playwright. Originally produced Off Broadway in Greenwich Village, the play was Broadway bound, until Childress became dissatisfied about changes she was asked to make in her play. The play remains as Childress originally wrote it, and also remains woefully underproduced. Aneesha Kudtarkar, a third-year director in the Yale School of Drama, sees irony in the way the play’s history relates to its subject matter.
Trouble in Mind, the third and final thesis play in the Yale School of Drama’s 2018 – 19 season, runs at the University Theater on York Street from Feb. 2 to Feb. 8.
Kudtarkar — who is going with the more neutral version — saw irony in the way the play’s history relates to its subject matter. The play is a satiric look at the tensions in the rehearsals of a fictional play, “Chaos in Belleville,” a Southern race play that ends with a lynching. Wiletta, the main African-American actor in “Chaos,” sees the fictional work, described as “a hard-hitting play with something to say about race,” as “her chance for a breakout role,” Kudtarkar said. But she then becomes dissatisfied with the way blacks are portrayed in the dated but “well-intentioned ‘progressive’ play.” Wiletta clashes with the director, and the comedy and drama of Trouble in Mind derives from a frank look at racist assumptions in the American theater.
Kudtarkar remembered her earliest reading of the play, when she was 18. She “didn’t quite know the world [of the theater]” the play depicts, she said. But she was struck by the way the play “puts the rehearsal room dynamic under a microscope.”
Last year, when choosing her thesis project, Kudtarkar said the play felt relevant to being “on a precipice — going out into the professional industry after three years” in graduate school. The issues the play raises about who gets to tell stories about racial difference have resurfaced in recent years, in theater and elsewhere. Four years ago, Broadway star Tonya Pinkins left a production of Brecht’s Mother Courage, updated and set in the Congo, because Pinkins, like Wiletta, saw the role as a stereotype that undermined the truth of the character she wanted to portray. What Childress, herself a successful actor, saw as a failing of the predominantly white theater world of the 1950s remains an issue today.
Kudtarkar and McMillian.
In the YSD production, Wiletta is played by second-year actor Ciara Monique McMillian. McMillian admits that “much has changed” since the 1950s, pointing out that “no one is asking me to play a Mammie role today,” she said. She also stressed the humor of Childress’ play. Wiletta’s three black colleagues in the play have “a spectrum of approaches” to “Chaos in Belleville,” its dialect “exaggerated” to the point of caricature. There’s a “comic element,” McMillian said, in how the actors “hear things in different ways.” The actors “play to type, but discuss” their problems with the stereotypes in the play. McMillian, the youngest actor in this production, welcomes the opportunity to play a powerful role — a 45-year-old experienced actress — that she couldn’t expect to play outside the School of Drama. The “conflict and tension” in the course of Trouble in Mind makes her character “grapple with the role and her integrity in the part,” McMillian said.
For Kudtarkar and McMillian, both women of color, part of the problem with “Chaos in Belleville” is its white male director’s unwillingness, or inability, to really listen to his actors. By contrast, McMillian complemented Kudtarkar for letting her actors feel collaborative in their actual rehearsals. Kudtarkar, however, said she sees herself in the fictional play’s director as well as in various characters, as all struggle with the problem of truth onstage. For Kudtarkar, the play “takes to task” the notion of “universal truths,” showing how “we all embody” such truths differently. Theater “pursues the truth” but such truths are “performative,” the “embodied truth” of characters in specific situations. Because the play-within-a-play is “conceptually wrong,” Childress’ play can make fun of it — but, Kudtarkar said, a revival of Childress’ play is “doubly removed” from both the kind of Southern race play the cast is rehearsing as well as the era of the actors of Childress’ day, making a contemporary production of Trouble in Mind “more complicated and nuanced” than it was in its day. Yet, she said, “the sucker punch still lands.”
The critical acclaim Trouble in Mind saw in the mid-1950s suggests that audiences appreciated its satire of racial stereotypes and its thoughtful approach to how theater is made. What might be more telling for audiences today, Kudtarkar said, is “the painful cost of theatrical artifice and the demands it makes,” so that, as individuals, performers are forced to break with something that fails to be true to experience. There are, she said, “multiple points of entry” into the play, and not only for those “navigating a career” in theater with its personal and professional demands. A play with a lot on its mind, Trouble in Mind makes us confront the way we avoid unpleasant truths by making them into acceptable fictions — at least until a more compelling sense of reality intrudes.
Trouble in Mind runs at the University Theatre, 222 York Street, from Feb. 2 to Feb. 8. Visit the Yale School of Drama’s website here for tickets and more information.
