Globe audiences who regularly see Shakespeare at this wonderful theatre are used to a certain quality this great writer routinely displays: prescience. Shakespeare makes us feel that he grasped certain contemporary ideas well before their most famous proponents first articulated them. Three centuries before Marx he writes about class conflict driving political change; four centuries before Freud he charts the psychological dynamics that inform human behavior. Perhaps prescience is a hallmark of all great playwrights of the past. We boggle at how they seemed able to foresee, ahead of everyone else, the way the seismic social forces operating in our world would play out over time.

Alice Childress is prescient in her modern classic Trouble in Mind. She was not the only writer who knew in 1955 that race would endure as a defining American issue, but only she saw how the American theatre would become a unique crucible for a racial reckoning that would shake our country. This reckoning erupted into our art form and its institutions in the summer of 2020, and in the time since, it has been both consequential and productive for the field. Activist organizations such as We See You White American Theatre and Black Theatre United have ignited a movement that has called for and brought deep change and real reform. Childress’s work charted this terrain seven decades earlier, but then the forces of opposition proved too formidable, as you can read about on other pages of this program. She is now at the vanguard of a major new flowering of Black American drama, and this could be called poetic justice, though its far-too-late arrival sounds a cautionary note.

Alas, sometimes what appears to be prescience is in fact the more sobering truth that little has changed. Wiletta Mayer and the other Black actors in Chaos in Belleville, the play-within-a-play whose rehearsals are the plot of Trouble in Mind, sound painfully like today’s Black actors when they describe the systemic racial injustices they’ve encountered in the American theatre. That we can see images of ourselves reflected in a 75-year-old mirror is hardly flattering, yet it is a very potent call to action. We honor Alice Childress at last by reviving her powerful and moving play, but we fulfill her vision of a just and equitable America when we ensure that Wiletta’s spirit, and Childress’s own, are remembered and celebrated as their heirs prosper in a field that finally hears what they were trying to tell us all along.

But I don’t want to make Trouble in Mind sound like a piece of agitprop. It is so much more than that. Childress possessed real gifts for vivid theatrical storytelling, dialogue that zings, characters who are as three dimensional as they are idiosyncratic, and most of all, a powerfully beating heart. Trouble in Mind courses with wit and humor, warmth and love, a deep humanity, and the fervent belief that the theatre really is worth fighting for because it really does matter. It’s a joy to hear Childress’s voice ringing through our building, and a privilege to be part of a national reexamination and rediscovery of her work. As this captivating and absorbing play demonstrates, she belongs in the pantheon of 20th-century American drama, and the Globe is privileged to play its small part in enshrining her there.

Trouble in Mind is directed by a San Diego treasure who, like Childress, is a champion of Black American theatre. Delicia Turner Sonnenberg is a Globe Resident Artist whose work has repeatedly graced our stages and whose artistry is important to us. She has assembled a team of hugely talented collaborators and in so doing has advanced the Globe’s commitment to inclusion in our teams of creative artists. I thank Delicia not only for her talent and advocacy, but also for her friendship, which I value greatly. With this excellent production of an unjustly neglected American classic, Delicia helps guide the Globe into the next chapter of its history with a thoughtfulness and grace that is its own form of tribute to Childress and her legacy.

Thanks for coming. Enjoy the show.