In Her Own Voice
Shinnerrie Jackson’s Journey to Playing Wiletta Mayer
The first time Shinnerrie Jackson performed in Pittsburgh Public Theater’s O’Reilly Theater, she was in the chorus of Ted Pappas’ 2011 production of “Electra” and it was “capital T theater.” The role was one of her first jobs out of graduate school, and being involved in this production felt like making it as an actor. She recalls Pappas’ discussions about The O’Reilly’s thrust stage and its design references to Classical Greek amphitheaters. For Jackson, the production was exhilarating because the size and design of the theater encourage mic-less productions.
“I’m a voice person,” she tells me, and I can hear—from our first hellos at a coffee shop near the O’Reilly Theater—how true this is. Jackson’s voice is sculptural in its strength and pliability, somehow solid yet flowing. “Electra” brought together her years of vocal training in opera and her years of training and work as an actor. And what I learn very quickly about Shinnerrie Jackson is that at every bend of the road, at every moment when the realities of this profession and the need to keep body and soul together presents, she knows what she wants is to be an actor.
Jackson returned to The O’Reilly this February to play Wiletta Mayer in Pittsburgh Public Theater’s production of Alice Childress’s “Trouble in Mind,” streaming through March 23 with the League of Live Stream Theater.
The play premiered off-Broadway in 1955 with Childress and Clarice Taylor co-directing. (Taylor also played the role of Wiletta Mayer.) Facing pressure from a white producer to change the play’s ending to ameliorate audiences, Childress re-wrote the final scene. When the show was optioned for Broadway, producers again asked Childress for more rewrites. After rewriting the play to the point where she no longer recognized her work, Childress ended negotiations. “Trouble in Mind” was rarely performed professionally until it finally made its Broadway debut with a much acclaimed 2021 production with the Roundabout Theater Company.
Today, the role of Wiletta affords Jackson the chance to mold her voice around a lifetime of experiences in the theater that mirror Wiletta’s and that extend this play’s reach to new audiences.
She began her professional career in high school, performing at Seaside Music Theater in Daytona Beach, Florida. The typical summer stock theater experience is relentless in its intensity and exuberant in its promotion of community and a kind of wild banding together. You might play Reno Sweeney one night and move sets for another show the next afternoon. No work is off limits, and summer stock is a place to learn the craft and to build relationships.
Jackson thrived in this environment. She recalls watching and interacting with older actors whose talk rarely invoked agents and instead compared notes on directors and other actors on the regional theater circuit. They’d swap recommendations for theaters in a particular region and share audition notices.
What Jackson saw as she began her career in high school was the reality of a working actor’s life pre-COVID, before mass theater closings. From her vantage point, there may not have been fancy cars, a lot of extra money, or long stretches in one place, but there was work that could be both fulfilling and life-sustaining. Becoming a journeyman actor became Jackson’s goal. Moving from place to place excited her, as did the possibility of strengthening her craft by working with a variety of directors and actors in many roles.
When our conversation turns to “Trouble in Mind,” Jackson leans forward in her seat, and when I begin to ask about her role of Wiletta Mayer, Jackson tells me she gets chills just hearing Wiletta’s name.
“She’s everything,” Jackson said of the character. “This is every Black actress I’ve ever met in my life—old, young, tall, skinny, no matter what their type is. She is a representative of all of us.”
In the play, Wiletta is an Everywoman showcasing the Black experience in a white-dominated theater in the 20th and now 21st centuries. Described as “middle-aged” with more than 25 years of acting experience, Wiletta’s roles have been limited to “mammy” parts and stereotypical caricatures of Black women: women named after flowers and food (Petunia, Honey); women serving white families while their own children are demonized. When Wiletta is cast in a Broadway production, she recognizes that its bill of progressivism is a thin veil over a particular form of white liberal racism. The conflict in the show—and within Wiletta—grinds against the reality of the opportunity this role affords and the desire to express one’s identity and skill truly and fully, without pandering to white tastes and notions of respectability.
“She’s everything. This is every Black actress I’ve ever met in my life—old, young, tall, skinny, no matter what their type is. She is a representative of all of us.”
Jackson first played Wiletta in 2021 when the Clarence Brown Theater—the regional theater affiliated with her home institution of the University of Tennessee—staged “Trouble in Mind.” She was initially cast as Millie Davis, but when the actor playing Wiletta could no longer perform in the show, everyone in the cast was “moved up” a role. While preparing to play Millie, she assumed she’d come onstage and “be cute” and that would be the end of it. When she began reading Wiletta’s part and came to know that character, Jackson reevaluated her approach to the play. There’s a stillness and focus around us as she reflects on the character.
“This is me,” Jackson said, “These are conversations I’ve had with white directors. These are situations I’ve been in in the professional theater.”
When she first played the role, Jackson connected with Wiletta’s lifetime of acquiescing to the demands of a theater world that didn’t always understand her talent and her experience. Jackson played the role from that place.
“I played her like me,” she said, with a small shrug and head turn.
Her voice settles into its middle register. With that first experience playing Wiletta, Jackson believes there are passages, lines, and aspects of the play that she didn’t quite touch in their fullness. Though others said she did reach into the range of the role, Jackson indicates that she knew within herself that she hadn’t. From that point, she prayed.
“Please let (Wiletta) come back to me,” she said.
When Pittsburgh Public Theater announced its 2024-25 season and auditions, she couldn’t believe how quickly she arrived at another chance to play Wiletta. This time, though, the show “feels new” not solely because the richness of the role allows for many ways to play the character but—and here, Jackson is adamant—Justin Emeka “brings so many new ideas” through his directorial style.
Jackson lights up, animates her gestures, and shifts her voice around its full range as she discusses Emeka’s impact as a director. In a way, the full expression of her character mirrors the full-circle story of first meeting Emeka when she was a student at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music to today, working with him as a professional in the theater. She laughs and asks me to wait as she looks something up on her phone. She finds it and then tells me that everything she’s about to say might be “revisionist history” (she had been looking up the Malcolm Gladwell podcast of the same name), but this is how she remembers first meeting Emeka.
As an undergraduate at Oberlin, Jackson took Caroline Jackson Smith’s workshop in acting, and Smith invited Emeka to run a workshop for the class. (Emeka is now a faculty member in Oberlin’s Theater Department, as well as serving as resident director at Pittsburgh Public Theater.) Emeka’s workshop emphasized to her that she could be “unapologetically Black onstage,” Jackson recalls.
She breaks to say she might have misremembered all of this.
What isn’t in doubt is a sense of purpose in this (re)connection between Jackson and Wiletta and Jackson and Emeka. Emeka is a director who is, Jackson said, “easeful,” unburdened by a need to see himself reflected in the performers. Favoring a careful and purposeful detachment—he’s not trying to mold or “pull something out of you”—Emeka asks questions and then gestures to a position of freedom. As Jackson relates, Emeka will often say, “We’ll see. You play it; and we’ll see,” following performance notes.
A few days after we shared coffee and conversation, I attended one of the final rehearsals for “Trouble in Mind” before full dress and design run-throughs. I watched as performers shift delivery, motivation, and movement in response to one or two questions Emeka poses. I came to better understand Emeka’s ability to say “one thing and it connect[s] to an unknown, out of my periphery that I knew was back there but I didn’t know how to play, to grab and then put into action or behavior,” as Jackson had described the effect of his process when we met several days before.
“Please let (Wiletta) come back to me.”
“What are you thinking when you do this?” Emeka asks, emphasizing the various costs of living this play throws into relief. He notes the “the cost of time flying,” the cost of time, the cost of experiences, the cost of storytelling.
As I watch the rehearsal, I’m reminded of something Jackson said to me a few days prior. She quietly but emphatically explained that there are difficult moments at the end of Acts 1 and 2, which involve finely calibrated emotional releases that are “so close to my own ambition and also so close to the inability to do it. The systematic inability to do it.”
There’s a relentless grind, she explained, to having to prove yourself over and over again. “Every actor experiences this,” Jackson said. “You get to a point where you’re like, ‘I’ve proven. I’ve proven. For 25 years, 30 years, 40 years, whatever, I’ve proven. You want me to do it again? You want me to tell you again that I know how to do this?’” Jackson helps me to understand.
There is an enormous cost to working at a high level in a system that does not acknowledge the fullness of your work, your training, and the unique perspective you could bring to new roles.
“Who hasn’t wanted that cathartic moment that [Wiletta] has?”
Again and again, Jackson reminds me that she’s not a person who has a business sense or has made a career through careful strategizing. She likes living in the moment, and even as she races toward the stage and opening night, she echoes Emeka’s stance by saying that we’ll have to see what actually happens in performance. In her gut, there’s excitement, anticipation, and a belief that this show will make people sit up and on the edge of their seats, that her fellow performers are taking these roles and this play to new heights.
Working with this cast and director is a “partnership, and when you have a good partner, then you can actually make something,” Jackson affirms as she looks toward performances in front of an audience.
As I’ve spoken with Jackson, I can’t help but sense that one of the most consistent and reliable partners in her making is her voice. Clear and structured, like a glass house, Jackson’s voice has three dimensions, rooms you can hear and levels of register above and below ground.
“I love my voice,” Jackson tells me. “I use it sometimes too much. Sometimes it’s just there. Wiletta taught me about my voice because of her cathartic moment. She [my voice] (is) there, she’s just there. And the training is there. And it is a woman. It’s gendered. She’s always with me. It is a friend.”
It's easy to leap to metaphors of voice—agency, presence, clarity, authority, even success. Yet Jackson’s relationship with her voice speaks to the kinds of self-knowledge and intimacy built over a lifetime of taking herself seriously as an actor, while negotiating other people’s—and the theater business’s—expectations of role.
Today, as Assistant Professor of Acting at the University of Tennessee, Jackson helps her students understand those business and professionalization strategies she’s claimed she’s never been able to master in her own pursuit of this career. By asking students to look at their bodies and identities and to understand how these will come up for scrutiny and categorization in the profession, she works with them so that they aren’t pummeled by low self-esteem. “I encourage their self-esteem. I teach acting. It’s just about self-esteem and autonomy,” Jackson says matter-of-factly.
For herself, she’s never wavered in her ambition to be “an actress,” but she has become more aware of how the slightest event could end her entire career. None of us are immune from illness, a disabling event, or personal obligations of care toward those we love.
In a profession that provides so much joy and so much pain, Jackson said she preserves herself through family, friends, and community and trying not to attach her identity to being an actress.
“I’m still going to read plays for the rest of my life,” Jackson said. “Even if I don’t have a voice, I’ll probably try to learn sign language and try to act out something and be in it and talking about it. It’s not like anything else in this world, this profession.”
Trouble in Mind will be streaming via the League of Live Stream Theater through March 23 at PPT.org/Trouble.