Imagine that Henry Higgins was a Black artist living in a Harlem tenement in 1964, and that he took Eliza Dolittle on as a project not to make her a proper lady, but rather to capture everything that made him look down on her, for posterity. Now picture this young woman turning the tables, as Eliza did on Henry, but with an even greater impact, so that she essentially became the artist’s teacher, imparting both wisdom and humility.
I’m not sure if Alice Childress had “Pygmalion” in mind when she wrote “Wine in the Wilderness,” the 1969 play that evokes (for me) this premise, but Childress certainly shared Shaw’s abiding interest in what we now call social justice — though of course, the time in which she lived and her personal circumstances led her to channel it in a different context.
A novelist as well as a playwright — her best-known work is probably the young-adult book “A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich,” which she later adapted for a film — Childress began her career as an actress. Yet as a light-skinned Black woman she was, by various accounts, frustrated by the limited number of roles available to her and, as the program notes for a new revival of “Wine” put it, by the lack of “stories on stage that reflected her world and the questions that her community was facing every day.”
So Childress began crafting such stories and characters herself — among the latter Tomorrow Marie, the formidable and delightful heroine of “Wine,” who has returned in all her glory in this smashing off-Broadway production, directed by Broadway veteran LaChanze.
A Tony Award-winning actress and singer who has in recent years also turned to producing, with great success — her credits include three Tony-winning productions, as well as two of this season’s most entertaining Broadway shows, “Purpose” and “Buena Vista Social Club” — LaChanze played one of Childress’s other fierce, resilient women in a 2021 production of “Trouble in Mind.”
For “Wine,” she has recruited a flawless ensemble, including Olivia Washington, whose father, Denzel — perhaps you’ve heard of him — is currently uptown playing Othello. Ms. Washington is cast here as Tomorrow, introduced as Tommy, a factory worker who is lured by friends of the aforementioned artist, Bill, to his modest home studio, captured in its cramped splendor in Arnulfo Maldonado’s typically evocative set.
As Harlem quakes from a riot that shook the neighborhood that summer, after a police officer killed a Black teenager, Bill is trying to finish his latest project. Titled “Wine in the Wilderness,” like the play, it’s a series of paintings — a “triptych,” Bill calls it — intended to capture Black womanhood in three distinct forms.
Two of the canvases, already completed, showcase an innocent child and a majestic, goddess-like creature whom Bill identifies as “Mother Africa, regal. … This Abyssinian maiden is paradise … perfect black womanhood.” The third painting will be this maiden’s opposite, representing “what the society has made out of our women.” Bill describes her as ignorant, unfeminine, coarse, rude, and vulgar: “There’s no hope for her.”
When Bill’s buddy, Sonny-man, and his wife, Cynthia, meet Tommy among the rioters, they’re sure they’ve found the perfect model for this lost soul. And when Tommy bounds into Bill’s pad, wearing a tacky wig and an outdated, mismatched sweater and skirt (courtesy of Dede Ayite, whose costumes are period-perfect), she certainly looks like someone who would inspire the disdain of educated, self-consciously progressive folks like Cynthia and Sonny-man — she’s a social worker, he’s a writer — during that era, or ours, for that matter.
The couple’s snooty assumptions, and Bill’s, are only confirmed when Tommy opens her mouth and begins complaining, loudly and in sometimes profane terms, about the chaos and unrest out on the streets, evidenced by occasional but sharp jolts in Bill Toles’s sound design. While the artist and his pals may see the pandemonium as the crass but justified behavior of the great unwashed — those equally oppressed but less enlightened — for Tommy, it’s an infringement that affects her quality of life.
We sense from the start that Tommy is sharper than the others give her credit for, but it’s not until she and Bill are left alone that we see her flower fully, as Bill, in contrast, expresses a world view that’s not only simplistic but markedly sexist. Yet unlike those who would mock her, Tommy, and Childress, offer true enlightenment, and the possibility of redemption, in lieu of judgment.
Ms. Washington, in a spellbinding performance, makes her character’s arc as credible as it is exhilarating. Hilarious in her early moments, her Tommy doesn’t transform so much as cast off her shell, revealing a soulful intelligence and, yes, dignity that defy any number of stereotypes concerning race, class, and gender.
Grantham Coleman’s Bill is a fine foil, his slick self-assurance gradually melting under Tommy’s warmth and light; Lakisha May’s elegant Cynthia and Brooks Brantly’s blithely swaggering Sonny-man evolve with similar grace. Milton Craig Nealy brings a grizzled poignance to a fifth character, simply called Oldtimer, an aging drifter; Tommy, notably, is the only character who asks his name.
“I like to know who I’m meetin’,” Tommy explains — and, plainly, to acknowledge and respect the distinct humanity in every person. “Wine in the Wilderness” advises we all do the same, with a wit and beauty that are fully served in this must-see production.
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