Cherissa Richards doesn’t remember a specific moment she became an actor, but she remembers when she became a director. The Winnipeg, Manitoba, native studied theatre at the University of Winnipeg, went to the National Theatre School in Montreal and got her Masters of Fine Arts Degree in Theatre at York University. From there she spent years as a Toronto-based stage, film and TV actor, before returning to Winnipeg six years ago to start the off-stage section of her career.
“I was never interested in directing,” Richards says. “But I had been working on a show that was about to be produced in Winnipeg, and they asked me if I wanted to direct it. I said, ‘Oh, god no, I’m not director, I’m an actor.’ But I decided I’d give it a try, and I just loved it.”
Richards specifically loved being at the centre of all the different elements of making a play — from set design, to audio and wardrobe — and serving a group of artists “to help build this beautiful thing” before all of their eyes. “That’s the thing that really hooked me as a director, and I never looked back. After I directed that first show, I went to the artistic director and said, ‘So what do I direct next?’ and he said, ‘Now you go learn how to be a director.’”
She’s learned how to direct well over the years, including her current project, Trouble in Mind, a co-production between the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre and the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton. “[Co-producing] is what a lot of theatres are doing now. Doing art is expensive, and it’s a great way to get shows running across the country.”
The play is about a troupe of actors in the 1950s rehearsing their own show (Chaos in Belleville) together. The audience gets a behind-the-curtain peek of all the hijinks and madness that happen backstage as a backdrop to the story of the main character, Wiletta Mayer, who speaks up against her play’s white director. “She’s a Black woman in the ‘50s who is used to kowtowing her whole career, which has been mostly small parts in frivolous shows, until this point, where she has a big lead in a big show. She goes on a journey of what it is to step up, find her voice, exercise her rights and claim her identity and place in this room.”
Written by Alice Childress in the 1950s, Trouble in Mind was the first play written by an African-American woman to win the 1956 Obie Award for Best Original Off-Broadway production, but it never played in the world’s most famous theatre district. “She would have been the first Black artist to have her work done on Broadway,” Richards explains, “but they wanted her to make it more of a happy play, and not be so real, and she refused to do so.” (Lorraine Hansberry would become the first African-American woman to have her work produced on Broadway, with Her Moment in the Sun, in 1959.)
The depressing irony of a Black playwright struggling to get her script — about a Black actress struggling to make her voice heard — to Broadway is not lost on Richards. And while the play’s relevance is disappointing, it’s not lost on the audience, either.
“The best theatre is a microcosm of the world that we live in, that reflects the society with which it’s engaging. The beauty of a great work is that it challenges us to see something in it that is of ourselves, and engage us into action, whether it pulls at our heartstrings or pulls at our social mores. This story is about identity, about struggle, it is about a fight. But in the end, it’s also hilarious. And the audiences are just loving it. They’re laughing their heads off and just having a good time, then reacting to certain poignant or racist moments with pauses and gasps. They’re connected to what they’re seeing on stage. And that’s what theatre can be good for, because this stuff is still going on, and we still have work to do.”
Get connected to the stage by seeing the show until April 16.
