Act 1 Summary

Trouble in Mind is Alice Childress' two-act play about the production of a Broadway play called Chaos in Belleville, which runs into trouble when some of the cast members do not agree with its perspective on racial issues and stereotypes.

The play is set in a Broadway theater in New York City, on a Monday morning in the autumn of 1957. The staging includes miscellaneous props belonging to the last production at the theater. As the curtain rises, a middle-aged Negro woman, named Wiletta Mayer, bangs repeatedly on the door of the theater. Finally, the theater's doorman, an elderly man named Henry, lets her in.

Wiletta's initial irritation at the locked theater door gives way to awe at being in the theater again. Henry recalls seeing Wiletta in a stage production twenty years ago. She is flattered, until Henry reveals that he had only...