"Trouble In Mind" a historic play makes its way to Pittsburgh's Cultural District this month
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) - The work of black, female playwright Alice Childress is now on the stage at the Pittsburgh Public Theater.
"Trouble in Mind" is making its Pittsburgh debut and we've got the story of how this play in a play came to be.
It's a produced rooted in the reality of the 1950s - an interracial cast of eight in a rehearsal studio are preparing for a fictional play called "Chaos in Belleville" about a woman who opposes a lynching.
Hope Anthony plays Millie Davis, a woman unhappy that the roles she takes on are based on race.
"Ideas of theater and art, it really imitates what we have gone through," she said.
Unlike Anthony's character, and everyone else in the play, Wiletta Mayer - the black, female lead speaks out against the productions' acts that offend her racial pride, specifically the ending.
Garbie Dukes plays Sheldon Forrester and he criticizes Willetta for disrupting rehearsals with her objections.
"I hope people take away that we should be kinder to one another, we all come from different walks of life, they all intersect," Dukes said.
Justin Emeka is the director of the play within a play and it made its debut in Pittsburgh at the O'Reilly Theater in the Cultural District this week.
"What the play is about, and what the history of the play is about mirror each other," Emerka said. "The play itself actually had a hard time trying to get to Broadway because the producers wanted the playwright to rewrite the ending."
Alice Childress wrote "Trouble in Mind" in 1955 and it made its debut at Greenwich Mews Theater on the west side of Lower Manhattan and was a success. Producers were impressed and like many playwrights, Childress wanted to see her play on the ultimate stage: the pinnacle of American theater, Broadway.
"They asked her to rewrite the play to make it more happy and she rewrote it like 15 times and it got to the point where she couldn't even recognize her play," Emeka explained.
In that moment, Childress put the pen down, giving up the chance to be the first black, female playwright to show on Broadway.
Instead, that ended up being Lorraine Hansberry with "A Rasin in the Sun" in 1957 just two years later.
Childress died in 1994 but her dream of getting to the bright lights of Broadway did not.
Sixty-six years after writing the play, it was truly destined for its moment, debuting on Broadway in 2021.
Now, it's Pittsburgh's turn and it hits the stage with the ending Childress always envisioned and believed in.
