Reviewed by:

• Trouble In Mind by Alice Childress, and: Wedding Band by Alice Childress
• Melissa Barton

If Alice Childress is having a moment, one can’t help but wonder what she herself would have to say about it. There’s no doubt that Childress deserves to be remembered, most of all as the author of plays and fiction freighted with irony and wit, shimmering with hope, shot through with ambivalence and ambiguity. She felt her career to have been thwarted by prejudice, and she certainly craved the Broadway marquee she never graced in her lifetime. Yet it’s difficult to know how she would greet her Broadway premiere in 2021, framed as a rescue from a half-century of obscurity.

The 2021–2022 season in New York City saw, seemingly coincidentally, two major revivals of Childress’s plays, each marketed as the resurrection of a lost genius. Both productions were couched in larger, overarching efforts by their sponsoring organizations to bring more Black plays to prominent stages—Roundabout’s “Refocus Project” collaboration with Black Theatre United, and Awoye Timpo’s organization CLASSIX. Both productions could be seen as responding, as well, to “We See [End Page 93]

LaChanze as Wiletta in Trouble in Mind. Photo by Joan Marcus.

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You, White American Theater,” a manifesto issued in 2020 by a broad coalition of theatre makers calling for greater diversity both backstage and onstage. To be fair, director Randolph-Wright, a Roundabout board member, had long wanted to stage Trouble in Mind; he directed a workshop reading 15 years ago, and Timpo similarly has had a longstanding interest in Childress. But when organizations committed to the classics resurrect old plays that are suddenly considered of the moment, it invites the question: are Childress’s plays newly timely, or are they newly timeless? Childress herself has a lot to teach us about the difference.

The plays certainly have a timely topicality, reminding us that white supremacy remains very much with us. And yet what is perhaps the most time-worn about the selection of these plays is their use as diversity programming: as Childress told James V. Hatch in 1972, the Greenwich Mews Theater produced Trouble in Mind in 1955 because “people were demanding that they do something Black.” The producers pressured Childress to make the play’s ambivalent resolution more cheerful and hopeful, and Childress capitulated, though she soon regretted it. Two years slogging through rewrites caused her to abandon a Broadway transfer, even though it would have made her the first Black woman playwright to be produced on the Great White Way—four years ahead of Lorraine Hansberry. Life very closely imitated art, since Trouble in Mind is a backstage “comedy-drama,” depicting a similar argument in rehearsals for Chaos in Belleville, a fictionalized, putatively anti-racist play. The director “Al Manners,” a pious mid-century liberal partly modeled on Elia Kazan and other Actors Studio contemporaries, and played in the Roundabout production by a wonderfully unctuous Michael Zegen, tells his cast, “We’re making one, beautiful, clear, point…violence is wrong […] It does not matter to me that they’re Negroes. Black, white, green, or purple, I maintain there is only one race…the human race.” The statement rings like the cocking of Chekhov’s gun. Before the play’s end, Manners has been exposed as a racist, and the star, Wiletta, has refused to perform, causing the production to crumble.

Trouble in Mind is a tonal masterpiece, and director Randolph-Wright and the nine-member cast nimbly handled the play’s comedic opening beats of interwoven banter. Chaos in Belleville, the play being produced within Trouble in Mind, is an anti-lynching melodrama in the vein of white southerner Paul Green’s work from the 1920s. Both 1955 and 2021 audiences winkingly recognized the play as “problematic.” Trouble in Mind is not an anti-lynching play per se, even though it includes...

审核人：

• 爱丽丝·柴尔德里斯的烦恼，以及：爱丽丝·柴尔德里斯的结婚戒指
• 梅丽莎巴顿

如果 Alice Childress 有时间，人们不禁想知道她自己会对此说些什么。毫无疑问，柴尔德里斯值得被铭记，最重要的是，作为充满讽刺意味和机智的戏剧和小说的作者，闪烁着希望的光芒，充满矛盾和模棱两可的情绪。她觉得自己的职业生涯受到了偏见的阻碍，她当然渴望成为她一生中从未登上过的百老汇大帐篷。然而，很难知道她将如何迎接 2021 年在百老汇的首演，这场首演被认为是从半个世纪的默默无闻中解脱出来。

看似巧合的是，2021-2022 年的演出季在纽约市见证了柴尔德里斯戏剧的两次重大复兴，每一次都以一位逝去的天才的复活为卖点。这两部作品都由其赞助组织进行了更大的总体努力，以将更多的黑人戏剧带到突出的舞台上——Roundabout 与 Black Theatre United 以及 Awoye Timpo 的组织 CLASSIX 合作的“Refocus Project”。这两部作品也可以被视为对“我们看到[End Page 93]

LaChanze 在《心灵烦恼》中饰演 Wiletta 。琼·马库斯摄。

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你，美国白人剧院”，这是一个广泛的剧院制作人联盟于 2020 年发表的宣言，呼吁在后台和舞台上实现更大的多样性。公平地说，Roundabout 董事会成员 Randolph-Wright 的导演早就想上演Trouble in Mind了；15 年前，他主持了一个阅读工作坊，Timpo 同样对 Childress 有着长期的兴趣。但是，当致力于经典的组织复活突然被考虑的旧剧时，它引发了一个问题：Childress 的剧本是新近及时的，还是新近永恒的？Childress 自己可以教给我们很多关于差异的知识。

这些戏剧当然具有适时的话题性，提醒我们白人至上主义仍然与我们息息相关。然而，关于这些戏剧的选择最陈旧的也许是它们作为多样性节目的使用：正如 Childress 在 1972 年告诉 James V. Hatch 的那样，Greenwich Mews Theatre 在 1955 年制作了 Trouble in Mind，因为“人们要求他们做点黑事。” 制片人向 Childress 施加压力，要求她使该剧矛盾的结局更加令人愉快和充满希望，Childress 屈服了，尽管她很快就后悔了。两年的重写苦苦挣扎导致她放弃了百老汇的转会，尽管这本可以使她成为第一个在伟大的白色大道上制作的黑人女剧作家——比洛林·汉斯伯里早四年。生活非常模仿艺术，因为Trouble in Mind是一部后台“喜剧剧”，描绘了在 Belleville 的 Chaos排练中类似的争论，这是一部虚构的、被认为是反种族主义的戏剧。导演“Al Manners”是一位虔诚的中世纪自由主义者，部分模仿了 Elia Kazan 和其他 Actors Studio 同时代的人，并在由非常油腻的 Michael Zegen 出演的 Roundabout 制作中扮演，告诉他的演员，“我们正在制作一个，美丽，清楚，要点……暴力是错误的[……]对我来说，他们是黑人并不重要。黑色、白色、绿色或紫色，我认为只有一个种族……人类。” 这句话听起来像契诃夫的枪响了。在该剧结束前，Manners 被曝光为种族主义者，而明星 Wiletta 拒绝演出，导致制作崩溃。

《心灵烦恼》是一部有声调的杰作，导演伦道夫-赖特和九名演员灵活地处理了该剧交织在一起的戏谑的喜剧开场节拍。贝尔维尔的混乱是在“心灵烦恼”中制作的戏剧，是一部沿用 1920 年代南方白人保罗·格林 (Paul Green) 作品的风格的反私刑情节剧。1955 年和 2021 年的观众都眨眼间认为这部剧“有问题”。Trouble in Mind本身并不是一部反私刑剧，尽管它包括……