The subject of the painting is stunning — a regal Black woman in tiger print, her Afro crowning her head like a dandelion. She basks in a halo of warm yellows and oranges that give her the appearance of a walking sunset, or a wild flame. She is the vision of “perfect Black womanhood,” according to the artist who painted her in “Wine in the Wilderness,” Classic Stage Company’s new production that opened Monday. This show, like the painting, is beautiful. It is also essential for the complexity beneath its surface.
The creator of this perfect Black woman is Bill (Grantham Coleman), who’s working in his one-room apartment while outside the streets of Harlem are awake with riots. It’s the summer of 1964, and Bill is spending the riots painting when he gets an unwelcome visit by Oldtimer (a charming Milton Craig Nealy), who’s dropped by with some loot. Bill’s working on a triptych called “Wine in the Wilderness” for an upcoming exhibition. The first two parts — a painting of an angelic young Black girl and the second of “Mother Africa,” his perfect Black woman — are done. The final piece, he explains to Oldtimer, will be a painting of a “messed-up chick,” a Black woman who’s “ignorant, unfeminine, coarse, rude, vulgar.” He just hasn’t found his subject yet.
Conveniently, Bill’s married neighbor-friends, Sonny-man (Brooks Brantly) and Cynthia (Lakisha May), are on their way to his place after some mid-riot drinks with the perfect model to complete his work. That would be the rambunctious Tommy (Olivia Washington), and Bill is pleased to discover that she’s exactly the kind of “messed-up chick” he needs to paint.
Written in 1969 by Alice Childress, one of the great but underappreciated Black playwrights, “Wine in the Wilderness” is set over the course of just a few hours, from the evening riots into the morning. It’s a lean parable (the production runs a fleet 85 minutes) about what progress truly looks like — and where the seeds of change can begin — in a revolution.
We’re fortunate to be in the midst of a rediscovery of Childress’s work, including the recent Broadway production of “Trouble in Mind” and an Off Broadway production of “Wedding Band.” “Wine in the Wilderness,” like Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s equally compelling “Purpose,” depicts something we don’t see often enough onstage: cross sections of gender, class and sexuality within the Black experience. It reveals the conflicting values and complex expectations that must come with any well-drawn portrait of a community of people.
Sonny-man, in his African dashiki top, and Cynthia, fashionable and wearing a well-coiffed natural cut (costumes are by Dede Ayite, and hair by Nikiya Mathis), are the picture-perfect progressive Black couple, even if their biases undermine that. Oldtimer, believing he’s past redemption and too old for the revolution, resorts to booze and clowning. And one of Bill’s favorite pastimes seems to be critiquing the revolution from the safety of his apartment. (Arnulfo Maldonado’s set design channels a shabby artist’s apartment with the marks of a talented intellectual — littered with books and canvases, bright Jacob Lawrence-esque paintings hanging on the walls behind the audience.)
“Fella like you oughta be fed up with your people sometime,” Oldtimer encourages him, and Bill obliges throughout the play, treating Tommy in particular to countless remonstrations set to the tune of “that’s the problem with our women …”
Coleman leads a strong cast as Bill, a Black man blind to his own misogyny and classism. He’s no villain, though; Bill confidently preaches of Black excellence and change without seeing how his prejudices and internalized racism have contorted his vision of a Black future.
That future certainly doesn’t have room for women like Tommy, who appears in mismatched clothes (her place and most of her things were trashed by the riot) and a long blonde wig. She’s loud and unfiltered, what Cynthia judgmentally calls “hard,” the kind of Black woman who is too forward and independent to be considered traditionally feminine.
Washington’s Tommy is appropriately oversized in personality and charms from her arrival; her gestures are large and showy, her jokes and flirtations blunt and jarringly robust. Under LaChanze’s measured direction, Tommy is a character who perhaps also draws the audience’s unconscious bias, the Black woman we hear described as a wreck before we even meet her, whose circumstances are only acceptable when translated through the grace of Bill’s art.
Washington’s performance gradually reveals Tommy in all her depth, and by the end of the play she is delightfully ablaze with righteous anger. Despite Bill’s plea to use the more politically correct “Afro Americans,” Tommy defiantly shoots out that unprintable racial slur instead, and Washington’s wielding of the expletive is so fierce it’s almost beautiful. That may seem unthinkable to some readers or audience members, that a Black character can use such historically hateful language as a point of pride. But as a Black woman watching another Black woman challenge those who would dismiss her, I’ll say her language felt truthful, even liberating. It certainly felt novel on the stage.
“Black is beautiful,” Bill proclaims at one point. “Then how come it is that I don’t feel beautiful when you talk to me,” Tommy snaps back. When we talk of revolution, we don’t always talk about beauty. Childress’s play proves that the ways we see ourselves, as Black men and women, and what we value in ourselves are reflective of where we are in the path toward progress.
Wine in the Wilderness
Through April 13 at Classic Stage Company, Manhattan; classicstage.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/25/theater/wine-in-the-wilderness-review.html
