TROUBLE IN MIND Plays Aurora Theatre Company, 8/20-9/26

Aurora Theatre Company opens its 19th season with Alice Childress' vibrant, humorous, and heartbreaking look at racism through the lens of the theater, TROUBLE IN MIND. Robin Stanton (Speech & Debate, Betrayed, Permanent Collection) directs this play about race, identity, and opportunity, featuring Bay Area favorite Margo Hall in her Aurora Theatre Company debut, along with Tim Kniffin, Rhonnie Washington, Elizabeth Carter, Michael Ray Wisely, Earll Kingston, Patrick Russell, Jon Gentry, and Melissa Quine. TROUBLE IN MIND plays August 20 through September 26 at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley. For tickets ($34-55) and information the public can call (510) 843-4822 or visit auroratheatre.org.

More than 40 years after it was written, TROUBLE IN MIND, according to The New York Times, "still has the power to make one feel its anger and humor." Set during the early years of the Civil Rights movement, it offers a disconcerting yet disarmingly funny look at the inequalities of American life in the 1950's, and the half-truths we tell ourselves about race relations and societal progress in America. TROUBLE IN MIND follows a cast of black and white actors attempting to mount a production of a "progressive" new play. The play-within-the-play, entitled Chaos in Belleville, an anti-lynching drama set in the South, written by a white writer and directed by a white director, marks the first opportunity for Wiletta Mayer, a gifted African American actress, to play a leading lady on Broadway. But what compromises must she make to succeed?

While TROUBLE IN MIND made Alice Childress the first female writer to win an OBIE award, in a twist of irony echoing the tribulations in the play itself, she was offered a Broadway production of TROUBLE IN MIND if only she would rewrite the ending and change the title. Childress refused, and the following year Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun went on to become the first Broadway play written by an African American woman.

Aurora Theatre Company has assembled an extraordinary ensemble for TROUBLE IN MIND. Award-winning actor, director, and playwright Margo Hall makes her Aurora debut as Wiletta Mayer. A founding member of Campo Santo, Hall has appeared in the company's productions of Jessica Hagedorn's Stairway to Heaven and Fe' in the Desert, Naomi Iizuka's Hamlet: Blood in the Brain, floating weeds by Philip Kan Gotanda, References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, by Jose Rivera, Bethlehem by Octavio Solis, and Hurricane by Erin Cressida Wilson. Additional stage credits include productions at Arena Stage, Guthrie Theater, American Conservatory Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where she co-wrote and appeared in The People's Temple, Magic Theatre, Brava! for Women in the Arts, and Word For Word, among others. Hall was most recently seen on stage in Chinaka Hodges' Mirrors in Every Corner at Campo Santo and Marcus Gardley's This World in a Woman's Hands at Shotgun Players; she most recently directed the SF Playhouse/Lorraine Hansberry co-production of The Story by Tracy Scott-Wilson.