Review: Wine in the Wilderness, Another Ahead-of-Its-Time Drama by Alice Childress

The playwright Alice Childress was an unsung American artist during her lifetime. Her plays were all considered too scandalous for major productions in the 1950s and ’60s when she was writing: their subjects—Black empowerment, interracial romance—unpalatable for the white theatrical establishment. She died in 1994, and it still took another 27 years for her to have a production on Broadway.

That was Trouble in Mind, a backstage drama about racism in the theater industry, which Roundabout Theatre Company presented in 2021. It starred the eminent Tony winner LaChanze in a rare dramatic turn, and that experience, I’m sure, led to the current off-Broadway revival of Childress’s Wine in the Wilderness at Classic Stage Company, in which LaChanze makes her directorial debut.

Set against the backdrop of a Harlem riot in the mid-1960s, Wine in the Wilderness centers on Bill Jameson (Grantham Coleman), a painter currently working on a triptych about Black womanhood. The first panel is of an innocent little girl; the second the platonic ideal of a female. The third panel is unpainted; Bill is looking for a subject he describes as “the lost woman … ignorant, unfeminine, coarse, rude, vulgar.”

Enter Tomorrow Marie (Olivia Washington), whom neighbors Cynthia (Lakisha May) and Sonny-man (Brooks Brantly) met at a bar and delivered to Bill practically on a silver platter. However, “Tommy,” as she’s called, hardly proves to be the “poor dumb chick that’s had her behind kicked until it’s numb.” Self-possessed and more forward-thinking than this supposedly enlightened crowd, Tommy desires companionship and to be taken care of. What will it take for Bill to see the real Tommy, the Tommy with cornrows and a foul mouth, and not the blonde-wigged version of Tommy he wants immortalize on canvas?

Despite having five characters (the fifth is Milton Craig Nealy’s Oldtimer, a kindly small-time crook with a heart of gold), the bulk of Wine in the Wilderness is a two-hand romance between Bill and Tommy. Through his attempts to shape Tommy into his artistic ideal, she reveals to him the futility of reducing the vastness of the Black female experience to fit in with his rigid, binary way of thinking.

Childress packs much dramatic and intellectual debate into the play’s brisk 85-minute runtime, though LaChanze’s production softens its impact, making it feel more comfortable than it should. To be fair, staging a work of this magnitude would probably challenge even the most experienced director. In no way does she let Childress down, but this mounting merely skims the surface, much like the first two panels of Bill’s magnum opus.

There are glimmers of true greatness in Washington’s performance as you watch her tough talk and bravado melt during an overheard phone call where she thinks Bill is extolling her greatness to his benefactor (we, of course, know that he’s not). And when she discovers Bill’s true intention, it’s leads to a moment of genuine heartbreak for Tommy and us. The other performances are indifferent, the chemistry between the actors severely lacking throughout.

The designers have figured out how to use Classic Stage’s unfriendly three-quarter thrust to their advantage. Arnulfo Maldonado’s heavily detailed set encompasses the whole auditorium, almost looking like a diorama come to life through Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s lighting. Dede Ayite’s costumes and Nikiya Mathis’s wigs lovingly set the tone, period, and socioeconomic levels of the characters. Honestly, it’s some of the most interesting design I’ve seen in that room in years.

Wine in the Wilderness is the third Alice Childress play New York has seen since the Covid shutdown (following the aforementioned Trouble in Mind and Theatre for a New Audience’s meticulous production of Wedding Band in 2022). As an audience member and a theater-lover, it’s been a pleasure to see this ahead-of-her-time writer finally achieve her long overdue success story. Let’s hope these plays get seen for years to come.