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by Alice Childress, directed by Jordan Laffrenier

Canadian Stage Company, Berkeley Street Theatre, 26 Berkeley Street, Toronto

September 24–October 11, 2026

Tommy: “I’m not the one you made up and painted, the very pretty lady who can’t talk back”

The rediscovery of the plays of Black American playwright Alice Childress (1916-94) has been one of great pleasures in theatre in the past ten years. The Shaw Festival was the first to present the Canadian premiere of her play Trouble in Mind (1955) in 2021. Then in 2023 the Stratford Festival presented her play Wedding Band (1966). Now Canadian Stage is presenting Wine in the Wilderness, a play written for television in 1969. While the play does not have the same emotional impact as Trouble in Mind or Wedding Band, it still provides a fascinating snapshot of the Black experience in America that reveals it as far more divided than is usually portrayed as well as an allegory about art created by Black Americans.

All the action takes place in the single naturalistic, highly detailed set designed by Scott Penner depicting the studio plus kitchen in the apartment of painter Bill Jameson. The time is 1964. The place is Harlem. We hear rioting in the streets below Bill’s apartment. Bill is first visited by an elderly man known only as Oldtimer, a resident of the building, who comes in holding various items he has scavenged from the looting that has taken place. In his mind he is not a thief. He has merely been cleaning up after the thieves.

In chatting with Oldtimer, Bill revels that he is working on a major work, a triptych titled “Wine in the Wilderness” depicting Black womanhood. The title comes from the famous lines of Edward Fitzgerald’s 1859 translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, A Loaf of Bread—and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness—

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

The first panel of the triptych represents innocence in the portrait of a young girl who lives nearby. The second panel portrays Mother Africa as the source of all that is beautiful and majestic about being Black. The third panel, that Bill has not yet painted, is to represent “a messed up chick” of today to contrast with the innocence of the young girl. Bill calls the third woman, “A chick that ain’t fit for nothin’ but to … just pass her by”. Bill is expecting that his mural will find a place in some large public building.

The next characters to enter are Bill’s friends Sonny-Man and Cynthia, a writer and a social worker, who have brought with them a woman they have just met named Tommy. The place where Tommy was living has just been burnt down in the riot. She has lost everything. Unlike the college-educated Sonny-Man and Cynthia, Tommy’s formal education stopped at eighth grade. She doesn’t know what she is going to do.

The couple has brought Tommy to Bill because they think she would be the perfect model for the third panel. Tommy knows only that they think Tommy should paint her. Tommy does not know what her likeness is meant to symbolize.

Bill and Tommy interact mainly through argument. Tommy initially likes Bill but soon enough she thinks he looks down on her. What we see while they argue is that Tommy is not really “the messed up chick” that Sonny-Man and Cynthia thought she was. Tommy may have no home and little education, and she may not speak in a cultured way like Bill, Sonny-Man and Cynthia, but she has a firm knowledge based on experience rather than books and a clear idea of who she is.

In terms of action, the main questions of the play are whether Bill will ever paint Tommy and whether she will agree to sit if she ever finds out how Bill and his educated friends regard her.

Childress’s play is especially interesting in how it uncovers various types of schisms within the Black community of the 1960s. The most obvious division is between the educated like Bill, Sonny-Man and Cynthia and the uneducated like Oldtimer and Tommy. When Sonny-Man refers to the rioters as “the masses”, Tommy tells him there is no “we-ness” in him. She sees he in no way identifies with the rioters or her in any real way. The educated three, particularly Cynthia, speak as if they have consciously tried to erase whatever local accent they might have had. Tommy frequently uses the N-word to refer to other Black people and herself, whereas the educated three try to encourage Tommy to use the new “correct” term “Afro-American”.

What might strike a modern audience as surprising is that not all the characters support the riots that are happening. Bill says that Sonny-Boy calls them “the “people’s revolution”, but Bill looks down on the rioters as directionless. Bill says, “Revolutions should be for liberation”. When Tommy praises Martin Luther King, Jr. and says she loves his “I have a dream” speech, Bill surprisingly is unenthusiastic about him: “A great guy. But’s it’s too late in the day for the singing’ and prayin’ now”. About Malcom X, he asks, “Where’s the program?” We gradually come to see that as a thinker, Bill is much like an ivory tower intellectual who believes that art should be separate from politics. From his surroundings and his confidence, we note that Bill is not a starving artist.

When Bill meets Tommy he agrees with Sonny-Man and Cynthia that she is perfect for his third panel. What we, and Tommy, don’t quite realize at first is that Bill and his friends view Tommy as a stereotype of a loser, i.e., someone who is not one of them. We also don’t realize at first is that despite Bill’s advanced ideas in other areas and despite Bill’s painting celebrating Black womanhood, he is still a male chauvinist. Bill says outright, “The Matriarchy gotta go. Yall throw them suppers together, keep your husbands happy, raise the kids”. As Tommy points out later in the play, Bill is fine with turning models into images of ideal types, but he doesn’t know how to deal with real women. As she says, “I’m not the one you made up and painted, the very pretty lady who can’t talk back”. Cynthia, who one might think is a feminist, advises Tommy that to draw Bill’s attention, Tommy has to increase her “sex-appeal”.

Childress builds into this fraught situation the question of the purpose of art, especially the work by Black Americans should be. The play very clearly turns away from the notion of idealizing Africa to that of portraying the reality of Black Americans today. On a more general level, Childress is looking at the role of the artist and his model. Does he try to capture the particular reality of the model before him? Or does he use the model as a framework whereon he can cast his own vision?

If there is a flaw with Wine in the Wilderness it is that Childress has made the play more of an allegory about art and the future of Black Americans than a slice of life. Tommy is meant to be the model for the third panel in a scheme of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow where Tomorrow will be “a messed up chick”. It seems all too obvious the model for Tomorrow is actually named Tomorrow, “Tommy” for short. Childress means to plot Bill’s transformation from an idealist to a realist, but by the end that transformation feels forced and just too tidy, and it would be hard to say what exactly caused Bill’s enlightenment.

The play rests on the changing relationship between Bill and Tommy, and director Jordan Laffrenier has carefully charted the often out-of-sync phases of attraction and repulsion between the two. Mazin Elsadig makes Bill so charming that it takes us a while to notice how egocentric the character is. It is a strange feeling to start out liking a character at the beginning only to feel as the action continues that maybe our initial assessment was flawed. Elsadig shows what a fine actor he is by doing nothing to lessen the impact of the conflicted emotions Bill elicits. They only make Bill a more complex character.

Tommy is an ideal role for Virgilia Griffith. In the space of only 85 minutes Griffith charts Tommy’s growth from a seemingly naïve young woman rather too used to encountering disasters to a defiant woman, proud of who she is and unwilling to have any of the more educated people around her put her in a box. Her long speech excoriating Bill, Sonny-Man and Cynthia is a powerful, passionate calling-out of hypocrisy of people, however well-intentioned, who think they are better than others.

In smaller roles, Andrew Moodie stands out as Oldtimer, an old man we might pity except that his ruses are so overt and his comments are so candid. Childress paints a satiric portrait of the new politically correct couple Sonny-Man and Cynthia. She gives Sonny-Man little to say, but Jamar Adams-Thompson uses his few words to present Sonny-Man as self-confident to a fault. As Cynthia, L.A. Sweeney so carefully articulates her words that it seems Cynthia is deliberately trying to position her mode of speech as superior to Tommy’s.

While Wine in the Wilderness does not have the same emotional content as the previous two plays by Childress seen in Ontario, it still gives us a more complex picture of the thoughts of Black people during a turning point in American history. The play’s aim is to shatter stereotypes and predilection for stereotyping others. It is a privilege that Canadian Stage through this production has given us further insight into a playwright whose works need to be better known.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Virgilia Griffith as Tommy; Mazin Elsadig as Bill and Andrew Moodie as Oldtimer; Andrew Moodie as Oldtimer, Virgilia Griffith as Tommy, Mazin Elsadig as Bill,  L.A. Sweeney as Cynthia and Jamar Adams-Thompson as Sonny-Man; Virgilia Griffith as Tommy and Mazin Elsadig as Bill; Virgilia Griffith as Tommy. © 2026 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.canadianstage.com.