‘Wine in the Wilderness’ Review: Beauty in Blackness

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.