ARTS & CULTURE
Kimberly Marsh
Photo, Tulsa PAC
Theatre North will perform “Trouble in Mind” at the Performing Arts Center Liddy Doenges Theater, 110 E. 2nd St., on Feb. 15 and 22, 8 p.m., and Feb. 16 and 23, 3 p.m.
A local cast assembled and directed by Theatre North will bring “Trouble in Mind” to the stage for four dates in February. It will be the first time the play, characterized as a comedy-drama, will be performed in Tulsa.
African American playwright Alice Childress was the first Black woman to pen a Broadway-bound play featuring an interracial cast in the 1950s. But the work, “Trouble in Mind,” never made it off-Broadway. The white production team wanted to make many changes to appeal to a primarily white audience.
It was an ironic twist of fate and prophetic as well. Childress’s play was about a female African American playwright who wrote a play that white producers wanted her to change to make it more relatable for an all-white audience. Deja vu.
Childress made some changes in real life but finally had enough and halted the Broadway production. But it returned to Broadway in 2022, more than 70 years after its scheduled initially 1957 debut and 19 years after her death. As a result, Lorraine Hansberry surpassed Childress in 1959 as the first African American woman author to debut on Broadway with her show “A Raisin in the Sun.”
Still, Childress was acknowledged in the book “Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States” as the only African American woman to have written, produced, and published plays for four decades. She was also known for creating an off-Broadway union for actors.
The rest of the story, set during rehearsals, will be revealed during the performance.
Tulsa Director Frank Gallagher, who is working with Theatre North’s legendary Executive Director Maybelle Wallace, 94, said he would not reveal the ending and noted no easy answers, villains, or heroes.
“There are plays written today where within the first 15 minutes, you can say, ‘Oh, well, he’s kind of the bad guy, and this is going to end badly’…and you see that social point coming a mile away,” he said.
“In this play, it’s a little more difficult. There are whites. There are Blacks. There are sympathetic characters on both sides. There are people who have flaws on both sides. It’s a story about people. It’s a story about dreams and hard reality. And it ain’t no Disney story either. I mean dreams and hard reality, they come into conflict and the play doesn’t give you any easy answers on that. It kind of lets you think about it.”
The Theatre North cast includes SynCeerae Robbins as the lead, Wiletta; Ellé Evans as Millie Davis; Billy Ray Thomas as Sheldon Forrester, an actor; Frank Gallagher, who plays Al Manners in the play, doubles as the Tulsa play director in real life and in the play; and Andy Axewell as Henry, the doorman.
Tickets are available for purchase online at http://tulsapac.com/ and by phone at (918) 596-7111.
