It’s the summer of 1964, there is rioting in Harlem, and Bill Jameson (Grantham Coleman) is working on the third part of his triptych.  The first is a portrait of a child, titled “Black Girlhood.”  The second is Mother Africa, “black womanhood in her noblest form,” and this one he titles “Wine in the Wilderness.”  The third is unpainted.  Bill wants a model for his “lost woman, what the society has made out of our women.”  He appears almost to relish the parade of degrading adjectives he heaps on his hypothetical woman: “she’s ignorant, unfeminine, coarse, rude, vulgar, a poor, dumb chick.”  To Bill, “there’s no hope for her.”

These expectations are upended when two friends show up at his apartment with a model, Tommy (Olivia Washington).  She does fit his description, but standing next to Bill, it is he who suffers by the comparison.  His Mother Africa is a fetishistic myth that enables him to ignore the real women who surround him.  Tommy exposes the cruelty and the hollowness of his art.

Alice Childress’ Wine in the Wilderness is a solid play that examines class differences at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.  (In this sense, it serves as a companion to Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.)  Bill thinks his education makes him superior to Tommy, and he bullies her with his knowledge, quizzing her on American history.  The current revival at Classic Stage Company does justice to the text, and its strength is its supporting cast: Brooks Brantly as the dashiki-wearing friend who is oblivious to his sexism, and Milton Craig Nealy as Oldtimer, the aging alcoholic who is something of a clown, enjoyed but not respected by the others.  Oldtimer has the best line of the play.  When Tommy asks if she’s expected to pose nude, he chimes in, “Wearin’ clothes is art also.”

After a Broadway revival of Trouble in Mind and an off-Broadway revival of Wedding Band, Wine in the Wilderness is the third major Alice Childress production in New York in the last four years.  It seems she is on track to posthumously become a staple of the American canon.

Wine in the Wilderness runs through April 19th at the Classic Stage Company.  136 E. 13th Street  New York, NY.  2 hours.  No intermission. Photograph by Marc J. Franklin.