Trouble in Mind on Broadway Tickets

By: Alice Childress
Director: Charles Randolph-Wright
Producer: Roundabout Theatre Company
Cast list: LaChanze (as Wiletta), Michael Zegen (as Al Manners), Chuck Cooper (as Sheldon Forrester), Danielle Campbell (as Judy Sears), Jessica Frances Dukes (as Millie Davis), Brandon Micheal Hall (as John Nevins), Simon Jones (as Henry), Alex Mickiewicz (as Eddie Fenton), Don Stephenson (as Bill O’Wray)
Design: Arnulfo Maldonado
Lighting: Kathy A. Perkins
Costume: Emilio Sosa
Sound: Dan Moses Schreier

See playwright Alice Childress's Broadway debut 64 years in the making. Get Trouble in Mind tickets on TodayTix.

Childress's Trouble in Mind play centers on Wiletta, an experienced Black stage actress who is cast in the lead of a major Broadway production. The show is a rural Southern melodrama written and directed by two white men. Wiletta is just happy to have the job, and she tries to bury her ego when rehearsals reveal the play’s painful stereotypes. Yet as opening grows closer, tensions rise as the cast struggles to do good work under the white gaze — and in a white-run theatrical world.

LaChanze, a founding member of Black Theatre United, returns to Broadway as Wiletta following her 2019 performance as the Ghost of Christmas Present in A Christmas Carol. She also starred in Summer: The Donna Summer Musical in 2018, which earned her a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical.

The premiere of Trouble in Mind off Broadway ran in 1955 to instant acclaim, but Childress’s play failed to get its due in her lifetime after its Broadway transfer was canceled. Following a resurgence in regional revivals this past decade, Roundabout brings Childress’s prophetic work to Broadway.

Get tickets to Trouble in Mind on Broadway now.

What to Watch For

• Trouble in Mind premiered off Broadway in 1955 at Stella Holt's Greenwich Mews Theatre, where it ran for 91 performances to critical acclaim.
• The play’s canceled Broadway transfer would have marked the first play by an African American woman ever produced on Broadway. The transfer was canceled because producers asked Childress to tone down her treatment of racism, which she refused to do. The current Broadway production presents Trouble in Mind exactly as Childress wrote it.
• Childress wrote over a dozen plays. However, she achieved the most commercial success as a novelist, such as with the young adult work A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But A Sandwich.
• Trouble in Mind reopens Roundabout’s premiere Broadway space for plays the American Airlines Theatre, following its shuttering in March 2020.
• Trouble in Mind has received regional revivals in recent years in New Jersey, Malibu, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.