Romanticizing Black Female Experience in Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind

Abstract

The play Trouble in Mind, analysed in this chapter, portrays racism in the theatre. It illustrates a group of white and black actors practicing an anti-lynching drama, “Chaos in Belleville”, in a Broadway Theatre. Wiletta, a veteran artist, is ill-treated by the white director AlManners. She demands a change in the portrayal of the mother’s character that leads her son to his death. She refuses to even enact her role, but Manners marginalizes her as a black artist and as a woman. The director reinstates his racist supremacy throughout the play, which results in romanticizing the sufferings of black women artists, and thus the emergence of ‘self’ remains passive.