Star Tribune - Recommended

"...This 1955 play - which is experiencing a renaissance in regional theaters - starts as a standard backstage comedy and then crawls through personal emotions and racial history to become a meaty, thoughtful exploration of the intersection in which actors' personal lives confront the fictional roles they portray."
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Twin Cities Pioneer Press - Recommended

"...Fortunately, these "Trouble" actors seem to have clicked with their director. Despite some line bobbles, Moorer conveys her character's emotional journey with precision and she's balanced by Austene Van's tart pragmatism as a fellow actor who needs the job, even if it forces her to bow and scrape. And Tony Award winner (for the original "Dreamgirls") Cleavant Derricks slays a climactic soliloquy that should give everyone in the play-within-a-play qualms about the work they're doing. The characters soon forget it but I don't think audiences who go to the Guthrie's "Trouble in Mind" will."
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How Was The Show - Recommended

"...Overall this is a worthy production. Sixty years after Trouble won the Obie for the best off-Broadway production of 1955 there is still plenty of topical drama left in this play. References abound which still hit home today: from Hitler's belief in the gullibility of the electorate and the U. S. Congress mired in the toxic House Un-American Activities committee meetings, to the executions of Blacks by a white people who feel their actions necessary to preserve order, all have their parallels in our own time. It is to the Guthrie's credit that this play has been revived and the excellent dramaturge notes by Jo Holcomb give us a start in learning more about Childress and her career. The Guthrie has played it so safe for so long that it is surprising they even considered doing this play, which is all to its credit, no justification needed."
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Talkin Broadway - Highly Recommended

"...The stellar cast is a mix of long-standing Twin Cities actors and newcomers who bring new gifts to the McGuire stage. Margo Moorer makes her Minnesota debut in the pivotal role of Wiletta, playing this part with utter conviction. She beautifully captures Wiletta's moments of elation at being back in a theater, revealing her capacity for joy, but then finds Wiletta's core strength as someone who has endured enough to know just how much more she can bend. John Catron, with a long list of credits at the Guthrie and other Twin Cities theaters, plays director Al Manners with unbridled arrogance, a bully disguised as an artist, unable to see himself as others do. The inestimable Austene Van makes the smaller role of Millie Davis a glistening gem, who can put her innate glamour on hold when a paycheck is in question. Cleavant Derricks, a 1982 Tony winner as James Thunder Early in the original cast of Dreamgirls, makes his Twin Cities debut as Sheldon. Derricks conveys the role-playing subservience that has enabled Sheldon to survive in a white man's world, but casts out enough wit and wisdom to assure us he may act the part, but is no fool."
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Twin Cities Arts Reader - Highly Recommended

"...Trouble in Mind, which opened this past weekend at the Guthrie Theater, is a humorous and gripping play that is not often produced. The author, Alice Childress, was an African-American actress whose notoriety as a "left-wing" playwright merited her own FBI investigative file in the 1950s. The play was performed Off Broadway and earned an Obie Award in the 1955-56 season. This production, directed for the Guthrie by Valerie Curtis-Newton, is as relevant today as it was when Trouble in Mind premiered over sixty years ago."
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