More than 60 years have passed since the first staging of "Trouble in Mind," a satirical drama about the difficulties that a racially mixed theater troupe faces as it works to put on a show.
Opening Friday at the Guthrie Theater, the play has had a resurgence in recent years. That may be due to its thematic currency at a time when Hollywood, in particular, has been called out for its lack of diversity.
Playwright Alice Childress became the first black woman to win an Obie Award after the show's 1955 New York debut. This production features another first: Seattle-based director Valerie Curtis-Newton is the only black woman ever to helm a show on a Guthrie main stage.
"The American theater is slow to change, although we're doing arguably better than Hollywood," Guthrie artistic director Joseph Haj said. "Here's a play exploring some of the same themes that remain current today. The play is straight-up funny, and built so intelligently to be so."
We spoke with Curtis-Newton, a graduate of the College of the Holy Cross and the University of Washington who now heads the university's theater program, about her life, playwright Childress and the ways in which "Trouble" resonates today.
Q: Tell us how you became a theater artist.
A: I grew up outside of Hartford, Conn. My father was in the Air Force. And I worked in insurance before quitting that work to go to graduate school. I'd been doing theater at night, in all of my free time, and decided that I wanted to get trained. I wanted to find out what I knew, and why some of the things I was doing intuitively, why they worked.
Q: How does "Trouble" relate to you being the first black woman to direct a main-stage Guthrie play?
