Trouble in Mind in Berkeley? It’s funny and throught-provoking.

Al Manners (c. r, Tim Kniffin) directs Wiletta Mayer (c. l,Margo Hall) in front of cast and crew (l, Melissa Quine, Rhonnie Washington, r. front-back Patrick Russell, Elizabeth Carter, Jon Gentry) in Trouble in Mind

Photo by David Allen

In the Alice Childress play Trouble in Mind, now at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre, a Broadway stage director from Hollywood has to cope with an actor who does not like the script and an African American actress asserts her objections to lynching. The two threads twine inextricably together in a whimsically gripping melodrama. Does the humorously imperialistic director prevail or will the actress get her way? Robin Stanton’s staging in this three-quarter round space carefully provides deep personal involvement with the characters by keeping the faces of most of the nine actors equally visible to all sides. Eric Sinkkonen’s set design eloquently speaks the vernacular of a theatre stage.

Act I takes place at a table reading rehearsal on a stage. For the play-within-a-play, the texture of a backstage is thoroughly realistic with a rough brick wall, a rope gallery and guarded radiators mounted high. The first reading is tense as the actors enter and get ready to rehearse with each other, sight unseen. The mixed-race cast members seem affable enough toward each other, but when the director Al Manners enters in his “Hollywood director tweed.” Callie Floor’s costume design gives Tim Kniffin the sleaze and style to flesh out his overbearing, pseudo-creative character.

But Al Manners begins to meet his equal when his white skin and his play  written by a white man, Chaos in Belleville, an anti-lynching drama referencing the segregationist period around Montgomery Alabama, meet his leading lady Wiletta Mayer, a gifted African American actress fiercely and sympathetically played by Margo Hall. Wiletta will not compromise and wants the script changed to eliminate mention of lynching. Sometimes, in the real-life of theatrical endeavors a cast member or even a director will storm off the set because of artistic differences, drastically changing the original concept of the show.

The structure of this under two-hour play uses an ancient plot device (e. g. “The play’s the thing / By which we’ll catch the king” ~Hamlet; Bottom and The Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) to make a special pleading. The recalcitrant actor in this setting could have been upset about anything. I have seen actresses demand the director rewrite their lines while the camera was rolling (He did sit down and change the script for her.) All too often it’s just plain personality differences that break up a promising production. Childress could have chosen anything from disagreements over Nazi Germany (Having lived through World War II, Childress died in 1949.) to esthetic considerations of the script phrasing as a contentious point in the rehearsal process. Instead she chose to intimate an emotional fervor to deny the existence anywhere of lawlessness.

Aurora’s production and Jessica Heidt’s casting show us believably genuine people in their normal work environment. For instance, Earll Kingston as the octogenarian stage electrician Henry is lovably avuncular and picks up the loose end of the play script’s ending. Michael Ray Wisely is a versatile Bay Area favorite and his blowhard Alabama politician Bill O’Wray is spot-on.

Trouble in Mind continues through September 26 at the Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison Street, Berkeley. Tickets ($34 to $55) are available online at Aurora Theatre or by phone at 510.843.4822.

For more information please visit Doctor Theater.