Arena Stage’s ‘Trouble in Mind’: Character-rich and well-acted play about race

“White folks can’t stand unhappy Negroes, so laugh,” the veteran black actress instructs the young black actor in “Trouble in Mind,” Alice Childress’s wise and extraordinarily winning comedy-drama about American racial strife as it plays out in a New York rehearsal room, circa 1957.

The counsel of Wiletta Mayer, portrayed in Arena Stage’s wondrously effective production by E. Faye Butler, falls disconcertingly on the ears of Brandon J. Dirden’s John Nevins, who’s been cast along with Wiletta in what sounds like a ghastly Southern play, “Chaos in Belle­ville.” But while John disdains the idea of pasting on a grin of supplication for the show’s white director, he’s not above accepting a part in a Broadway play that treats black characters in the most patronizing way. It is, after all, a job.

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E. Faye Butler stars in Arena Stage's newest production about a newly integrated 1957 theater company performing in a misguided Broadway play.

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Even if the tensions of “Trouble in Mind” underline ironies we’re all familiar with — Childress wrote the play 56 years ago — there’s an abiding pleasure in a handling this wry, character-rich and well-acted. Director Irene Lewis first staged this production, with some of the same actors, four years ago when she was running Baltimore’s CenterStage. You readily see why she’d want to remount it, especially at Arena, where the work’s classic texture meshes superbly with the company’s expressed mission of shedding light on important American plays.

“Trouble in Mind,” which once upon a time had been on track for Broadway but never made it, materializes on the Kreeger stage as if it had been long-buried treasure. Discovering that it’s anything but musty — it percolates with cleverness and spiky humor — is half the fun. The impression is doubtless aided by the pleasing period picture engineered by set and costume designers David Korins and Catherine Zuber.

And it’s most assuredly affirmed in the ensemble Lewis has assembled. Anchored by Butler’s conflicted Wiletta, who’s spent a lifetime quietly resenting the servile roles and marginal status accorded to black actors, the cast gives the dramatist’s backstage barbs all the vinegary authority they deserve.

To an actor, the performers have grand meetings of the minds with their characters, especially that compact pillar of excellence, Laurence O’Dwyer, as the geezer of a backstage gofer, Henry, and Starla Benford as Millie, a long-suffering assayer of stereotypes who’d give her right eye if she could just once forgo wearing a bandanna onstage.

Marty Lodge, playing the superior, self-consumed director, and Gretchen Hall, as a cloyingly empathetic white actress eager to share her progressive racial attitudes, offer rewarding layers of authenticity, and Dirden brings to his portrayal a young actor’s sense of the working of his charm. Best of all may be Thomas Jefferson Byrd in his commandingly appealing turn as Sheldon, an old-school black actor desirous of nothing more — on the stage as in life — than making as few waves as possible. (His devastating delivery of the play’s centerpiece speech, about a crime against humanity he witnessed as a child, is guaranteed to chill you to the marrow.)