Trouble in Mind
By Alice Childress
Collective Consciousness Theatre
Playing at Bregamos Comunity Theater
491 Blatchley Ave.
New Haven
Through March 26, 2026. Preview March 12, 2026
“I mind,” Wiletta declares at a turning point in Alice Childress’ play Trouble in Mind, which debuted off-Broadway in 1955.
I watched a preview of a new staging of the play Thursday evening at Bregamos Community Theater in Erector Square in Fair Haven. The show is run by local theater company Collective Consciousness Theatre, which has been ruffling feathers and promoting social change for over a decade.
The actors played on each others’ tensions with precision, every movement and facial expression rippling across the ensemble in flow.
Wiletta, played by Tamika Pettway, is at a rehearsal for a play she’s in. Castmate Sheldon, played by Joshua Eaddy, is trying to say that seasoned Black professionals like them, as opposed to the younger crowd, don’t mind playing along with white people to keep the peace. This aligns with advice Wiletta herself gives to young castmate John, played by Justin Villard, at the play’s first rehearsal.
Laugh at everything they say, she tells him. John calls her a Uncle Tom.
When Wiletta finally says, “I mind” later in the play, she cuts through the confusion, acknowledges the very existence of her mind, and reminds the audience of the (larger) play’s title, all at the same time.
The play doesn’t put us through a rote back and forth between Wiletta and Sheldon. Sheldon understands, as he always has, though his strategies now seem to clash with Wiletta’s. It may appear like the two are fighting (as they continue to “fight” with Black castmates Millie, played by Raissa Karim, and John), but what they disagree on are methods, not knowledge.
The white writer and white director of the play within the play are still struggling with the basic knowledge, resulting in a failure to depict realistic Black characters.
Wiletta’s character, according to the script, sends her son to the county jail to keep him “safe” from lynch mobs angered by his intent to vote.
Wiletta explains to Manners that a mother simply wouldn’t do that. She would never send her son straight into the arms of untrustworthy white authorities.
When white liberals look back into the past (or to their counterparts in areas they deem “backwards,” like the American South), they often conclude that they themselves are smarter, better, more “aware.” Sometimes this seems to bear out. But, as Trouble in Mind shows, that arc can’t just be copied and pasted to Black people’s appraisals of their own humanity, whatever era or region they might be in.
Wiletta’s director, and then her castmates, echoing him to varying degrees, urge her to see — or at least pretend to agree — that her character simply doesn’t know better. She’s not enlightened, like Wiletta is. She’s probably never even seen a movie! Or a play!
But the white liberal myth of enlightenment might not even do what it’s supposed to do for white people. White director Al Manners, played by Griffin Kulp, who has propped himself up throughout the whole play as a champion for racial justice (as the director of an anti-lynching play), reaches in a desperate struggle of power and emotion for the white superiority tropes he claims to be against.
Childress’ play, and its life on stage all these years after its debut, showed that certain works of art made by Black American visionaries of the ’50s were destined for a strategic long haul. Some works had to skip a generation to arrive here whole.
I talked to Jenny Nelson, Trouble in Mind‘s director, about the lore behind the play. It was blocked from Broadway a couple years after its off-Broadway debut, a hurdle Childress was urged to clear by softening the play’s edges, making it more digestible for a broad audience. I guess I mean a white audience. Maybe “the people were’t ready,” as they say, but Childress clearly was. The characters she created were, too.
“What aggravates me always runs for a long time,” Wiletta says to John. White actor Judy, played by Elizabeth Finn, feels like the message of the play within the play is still fresh. She hopes people “learn something” from it.
Like what? her fellow castmates ask her.
“That people are the same,” she says.
Her castmates erupt in thinly veiled mock praise. How insightful, for her to see that Black people are human too.
At the time Childress was writing this play, she knew she was a real human being. The white industry that stopped her, evidently, did not quite know. (Don’t worry, they are listening and learning and trying very hard to get closer to knowing.)
Childress refused to edit her play in the end. If she had modified it, it might have gained more eyes when she was alive, but the version we have now would in all likelihood have been lost forever. And how many works have indeed been lost like that? I had to give it up to Childress’ methods.
Trouble in Mind is an anthropological marvel. From the levels of anxious hierarchy in white dynamics to the declaration that it’s scary to say anything (read: anything racist) these days, the play has its varieties of white culture under an exquisite microscope.
The story offers quick, incisive analyses before, after, and while examples play out on stage.
“They want us to be…naturals,” Wiletta tells John about white hostility toward Black schooling. Later, her director indulges in a spree of self-congratulation for bringing out Wiletta’s “natural” talent. He constantly teases, shames, and criticizes her for overthinking.
The truth, as Wiletta keeps trying to explain, is that she is a good actor because she thinks about it. She has a brain, with real intention flowing through it. And she will use it.
She does mind.
