Underneath the Grass Roots

Alice Childress has been having a moment the past few years. This extraordinary Black playwright, dead since 1991, wasn’t exactly a secret but she was long overlooked by America’s high-profile theaters. Now that has changed. In 2021, the Roundabout finally got her play Trouble in Mind to Broadway—64 years after white producers canceled its Broadway premiere when Childress refused to tone down the script. In 2022, Theatre for a New Audience mounted an exquisite production of the searing and heartbreaking play Wedding Band, directed by Awoye Timpo. And now Classic Stage Company has mounted a sizzling production of her other masterwork Wine in the Wilderness, directed by LaChanze—the star of the Roundabout Trouble in Mind, making her directing debut.

Those who know Childress only from the other plays just mentioned are in for a treat and surprise with Wine in the Wilderness. Trouble in Mind (1955) is a magnificent protest drama decrying the restricted opportunities for Black artists in the American theater. Wedding Band (1966) is an elegiac tragedy about the limits of inter-racial love, concord, and reconciliation in the American south. Wine in the Wilderness (1969), by contrast, has no white characters and is about the shifting and unstable sands of Black solidarity in the 1960s. Its central confrontation has a lot to say about today’s world.

Olivia Washington—who is, yes, Denzel Washington’s daughter—is the star of this production. And I’m thrilled and relieved to report that, unlike the passel of other Hollywood nepo-babies currently headlining a decidedly mediocre New York stage production uptown, she is not only excellent but anchors the show with grace and maturity. Her character is Tommy, a young factory-worker who finds herself hanging with aspirational Blacks when she’s burned out of her apartment during the 1964 Harlem riots. In the second act, when she realizes how degrading their view of her is, she lets loose a ferocious, metal-melting tirade that Washington delivers with electrifying rage and precision.

The play is set in the Harlem studio of a painter named Bill Jameson, played with spot-on nonchalance by Grantham Coleman. Bill is nonplussed by the riots raging outside and mostly just wants to finish his triptych of Black womanhood called “Wine in the Wilderness.” This work is two-thirds complete. One panel, as we see briefly, is a demure and innocent school girl, another a regal but commercialized African beauty who looks straight out of Vogue, and the unpainted third is supposed to be the typical Black woman debased by American racial inequality. Bill is seeking the right model for this vision, which he describes with astonishingly clueless chauvinism:

She’s gonna be the kinda chick that is grass roots . . . no, not grass roots . . . I mean she’s underneath the grass roots. The lost woman . . . what society has made out of our women. She’s as far from my African queen as a woman can get and still be female, she’s as close to the bottom as you can without crackin’ up . . . she’s ignorant, unfeminine, coarse, rude . . . vulgar . . . a poor, dumb chick that’s had her behind kicked until it’s numb . . . and the sad part is . . . she ain’t together, you know . . . there ain’t no hope for her.

Amid the shooting and looting, Bill’s friends Sonny-Man (Brooks Brantly) and Cynthia (Lakisha May), a writer and social worker, meet Tommy at a bar, tag her as the perfect brash and uncouth model for their friend’s painting, and bring her over. The play then contrasts her, along with Oldtimer, an old man from the neighborhood who stashes loot in Bill’s studio (played with cool understatement by Milton Craig Nealy), with the others, who judge them. To Childress’s enormous credit, the trajectory of the collision that results is utterly unpredictable.

Milton Craig Nealy as Oldtimer

Two different crises ensue. First, Bill discovers, when Tommy’s appearance changes, that there’s more to her than he understood. He’s that superficial, it turns out. After an accidental spill, she exchanges her mismatched clothes for a sleek African wrap and removes her “wiggy looking” wig to reveal awesome cornrows (changed from natural curly hair in the original). Only then does Bill ask about her family, which turns out to be far more invested in Black liberation struggles than he is. He starts to fall in love with her.

Then, after they canoodle, she learns of his triptych plan, understands the real reason why she was invited, and absolutely blows her top. The whole thing is an affront to her dignity that she refuses to tolerate. I won’t describe her outburst in any more detail because I want everyone to feel its power for themselves, with Washington. Nor will I explain the play’s supposedly redemptive ending, which some critics have found contrived, as Bill gets to pontificate about how much he’s learned. Suffice it to say that, no, Bill doesn’t deserve Tommy. I believe Childress knows that, and the contrivance is very much the point.

This is a very impressive directing debut by LaChanze. With an airy set by Arnulfo Maldonado that cleverly uses the whole of CSC’s interior, she manages the play’s many entrances and exits with admirable fluidity and efficiency. More important, she modulates the dance of extreme moods and personalities that drive the plot with subtlety and taste.

Our nation is in a terrible place at the moment, with millions caught in precisely the trap of the aspirational characters in Wine in the Wilderness: a weirdly seductive, retrograde, assimilationist dream in which the warped perspective of those who can appreciate America only according to a morbidly homogenized pattern of idyllic whiteness has somehow become normative again. Childress was neither militant nor non-militant. She was a wide-eyed realist. And because she started as an actor, she sought deeper truths about humanity in the bottomless contradictions of the characters in her writing. Go see Wine in the Wilderness if you want to see how that works, and gasp.

Photos: Marc J. Franklin

Wine in the Wilderness

By Alice Childress

Directed by LaChanze

Classic Stage Company