Messud reviews a revival production of Childress's play. While noting that many of the playwright's themes seem dated, "the play is not without resonances and relevance today."

"Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of reality... the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations." Thus wrote James Baldwin in 1963, in an open letter to his nephew on the Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation. But he could have been summarizing the theme of Alice Childress's 1956 play, Trouble in Mind, currently enjoying a belated British premiere at London's Tricycle Theatre.

The play takes as its universe a theatre where rehearsals are under way for Chaos in Belleville, itself a play about the South after the Civil...