THE NEWYORKER, DECEMBER 6, 2021 77
own answer to anybody else’s suffering
is to dismiss it. “I don’t do pity,” she
says.) The lighting, by Christopher Ak-
erlind, tries to indicate emotion—when
Montrellous is rhapsodizing, he gets a
fuchsia glow—but nothing that any
character says steers the play in a new
direction. Sad tales are divots for us to
navigate between laughs.
Much of the problem lies with Clyde
herself. In an early private moment,
Clyde and Montrellous—who have a
history that remains shrouded through-
out the play—are arguing about the
future of the shop. Montrellous lets
slip that Clyde has fallen into “gam-
bling debt,” and that the shop is some-
how mixed up in the trouble. That’s
the only thing we ever really learn—
or, at least, think we learn—about
Clyde. She rings a bell when new or-
ders come in, appearing at the window
to the kitchen all of a sudden, like a
poltergeist at the climax of a horror
flick. She rages through the kitchen,
spewing just enough bile to get the ob-
jects of her tyranny complaining again,
but she’s never subjected to the kind
of scrutiny that makes watching a char-
acter worthwhile.
Uzo Aduba is one of my favorite
televisual performers of recent years—
as Suzanne (Crazy Eyes) Warren in
Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black,”
and as the therapist Brooke Taylor in
the new season of HBO’s “In Treat-
ment”—largely because she holds
within her characters, and gradually
reveals, many layers of tenderness and
brokenness, irrationality and explosive
pain. At her best, her eyes, deep with
feeling, are like bowls left out in the
rain, steadily filling up with the liquid
stuff of personality. Here, those skills
are tossed aside. Clyde toys with angry
fear when her troubles come up, but
she never revisits it. She’s like an un-
generous sketch-comedy depiction of
a woman we want to meet, whom
Aduba could, I think, play well: wrath-
ful and dangerous, yes, but welling up
and bubbling over with a past—and
some drastic action—to justify it.
S
peaking of justification, “Trouble
in Mind”—the 1955 play by Alice
Childress, now making its much be-
lated début on Broadway (directed by
Charles Randolph-Wright for Round-
about Theatre Company, at the Amer-
ican Airlines Theatre)—slowly unrav-
els an aging actress named Wiletta
(LaChanze), who is reluctantly ex-
posed to an acting approach that asks
her to find emotions to support the
actions of her character. Her director,
Al Manners (Michael Zegen), fancies
himself a social and artistic progres-
sive. The play they’re rehearsing, slated
for Broadway, is about small-town
Black folks who, because they want
the right to vote, get threatened—and
worse—by a gathering lynch mob.
Manners, who is white, thinks the
play is on the cutting edge of race re-
lations—at least, as close to that edge
as the theatre’s commercial impera-
tives will allow. He pokes and prods
Wiletta, expressing dissatisfaction
with her performance as a mother
whose son is in big trouble, asking
her to “justify” her character’s deci-
sions, not merely to act them out with
rote professionalism. He’s trying to
make high art out of a play he doesn’t
know is offensive trash. The problem
is that Wiletta’s got a real artist in-
side her—“I want to be an actress!”
she says in the middle of a reverie—
and she learns the new method a bit
too well. She begins asking questions
that the script, and her director, just
can’t answer.
Wiletta starts out as a jaded vet-
eran, advising a younger actor to laugh
at the director’s jokes and tell little
lies to pad his résumé. She’s not the
only cynical one: her castmate Mil-
lie (the very funny Jessica Frances
Dukes) is in a wry fury about how
poorly she’s served by the roles she’s
made to play. “Last show I was in, I
wouldn’t even tell my relatives,” Mil-
lie says. “All I did was shout ‘Lord,
have mercy!’ for almost two hours
every night.” It’s a representational
lament that sounds stale until you re-
alize that the play was written more
than sixty-five years ago.
“Trouble in Mind” is pessimistic
about the structures that underpin the
entertainment industry, but it is bull-
ish about the possibilities of earnest
artistic pursuit. Even a schmuck like
Manners can read some Stanislavsky,
bring it clumsily into rehearsals, and,
unwittingly, spark the beginnings of
a revolution.
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