Halfway through Act One of the Milwaukee Rep’s remarkable production of Trouble in Mind, Wiletta Mayer sings a blues song. She’s just started rehearsal for the Broadway production of Chaos in Belleville, an anti-lynching melodrama that the director, Al Manners, thinks has something “important” to say. Manners asks her to sing it, and we hear an easy, soulful and confident performance. Mayer, after all, is a Broadway veteran of black musicals like Brown-Skin Melody – she knows her way around a song. But Manners wants “more.” He tries to get it by making Mayer free associate to words like “colored” and “Birmingham” (as in Alabama – the year is 1957, just after the bus boycott). More flummoxed and angry at Manners than at the reminders of racism, she erupts into the song again, selling it with snarling, heel-stomping hardness. It’s a stirring moment, but director Manners still isn’t happy. He still doesn’t think the emotions sound “real.”
Have I mentioned that Mayer is black and Manners is white? Playwright Alice Childress uses the politics of the rehearsal room to burrow deep into the psychology of relationships between blacks and whites. And while the play still smacks of some theater conventions of the 1950s, its fearless and probing examination of racial politics makes it definitely a play for today.
Childress and director Timothy Douglas have assembled a vivid collection of characters around Mayer and Manners, and never lets the rehearsal room doors shut out the outside world. There are passing references Birmingham, Little Rock’s Central High School (“throwing stones at little children, got to call out the militia to go to school,” one character says), and the McCarthy anti-Communism investigations. But the hot center of the play is the shifting relationship between Mayer and Manners, ending in two powerfully written monologues in which each character speaks with fiery honesty from their side of the racial divide. 
Lee Ernst perfectly captures the blend of good intentions and false consciousness that makes Manners tick. He’s a man of the theater, and his sense of rehearsal-room hierarchy dies hard, but he’s also a man of several dimensions, and Ernst finds many of them. Stephanie Berry plays Mayer with great humor, weariness, and fire. She comes to her final, feet-planted resolve through a tender weariness that eventually steels itself into anger.
It’s a testament to Childress that Trouble in Mind never became the first Broadway play by an African-American (instead, that honor went to Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun two years later). After its Off-Broadway success, Childress received many offers for a commercial production, but they demanded that she rewrite the play’s ending, making it more “upbeat.” She refused, thankfully, for now we have an insightful play and great production for which we can be grateful.
It suggests something academic: perhaps “a post-feminist examination of female subjectivity and the social construction of sexuality via the libidinal limits of lace and underwire.” But Kelly Anderson’s evening-length dance suite, The Bra Project, is really more like a set of variations on a theme. Alternately playful, celebratory and elegiac, its parts are connected only by its subject matter: the garment that about half of you are probably wearing right now (go ahead and check…I’ll wait). 
Only the first dance, guest choreographed by Elizabeth Johnson, betrayed a whiff of feminist critique. Set to a self-help text describing how to get the “most” out of your breasts without plastic surgery, Anderson demonstrated with a violently acrobatic series of pushes, pulls and tugs. Later, “The Bra Burning Myth” coyly evoked the ‘60s fad for destroying “instruments of torture” like bras and curling irons.
Other history-bound dances were more tolerant of lingerie. The film-noir-ish “A Black Lace Bra Kind of Woman” featured Christal Wagner channeling Cyd Charise via Rita Hayworth. “How to Undress in Front of Your Husband” featured Kim Johnson-Rockafellow revealing the seductress underneath the ‘50s apron and rubber gloves. And “Fioritura” was a glimpse of Reagan-era glamour, perfectly rendered by a cross-dressing Ryan Rau.
There was also girl-talk playfulness. Paula Biasi danced to a laundry list of slang words for “breasts” – everything from “apples” to “Zeppelins.” And “Bee Stings and Mosquito Bites” had a slumber party’s worth of bra-stuffing silliness. “Jugs” was even more inspired: focused on function rather than form, Anderson had her dancers riffing with props ranging from dairy bucket to milk cartons, eventually wielding breast pumps like a Charlie’s Angels trio armed with Berettas.
The finale, “The Pink Piece,” offered a stately tribute to breast cancer survivors, set to their own recorded reflections. It offered a chance to see Anderson’s knack with an a large ensemble. She has a strong sense of composition, and isn’t afraid of stillness. And like many of the jazzier numbers, she has a great sense of the Danceworks ensemble – knows what they can do, and what looks good on them.
