Iowa Stage Theatre Company: Trouble In Mind

Prompting laughs and provoking thought in equal measure, Trouble In Mind looks at the challenges of Black artists working with a white theater to tell what may not be an authentic story. Wiletta Mayer is black actor cast in another well-meaning “race play” of the time. She doesn’t mean trouble, but sometimes there’s only so much a person can take. This masterpiece by Alice Childress could have been the first play by a Black woman on Broadway, three years before A Raisin in The Sun, after premiering Off-Broadway in 1955; however, its first Broadway production was in 2021 because Childress refused extensive re-writes for the comfort of white Broadway producers.