A riot is happening outside, but the first sound we hear from inside the studio apartment set is Lead Belly’s “Black Betty,” playing on the record player. The Black prison work song, raw and rhythmic, was recorded in 1939 and later garbled by white rock band Ram Jam into something commercial, controversial and unrecognizable. It’s a deliberate choice by director Jordan Laffrenier: in Wine in the Wilderness, we’re about to watch a play about Black identity, and what can get lost or distorted by art.
Alice Childress wrote Wine in the Wilderness in 1969 for public television, as part of a wave of work by Black women playwrights demanding space in American theatre. Childress, who was almost the first Black woman to have a play professionally produced on Broadway (see Laffrenier’s excellent Director’s note in the program for the detail on this), spent her career writing complex working-class Black characters who refused to be symbols. This Canadian premiere, which is part of Canadian Stage’s 2026–27 season, proves that her work still has teeth.
The setup is deceptively simple. It’s 1964, and the Harlem uprising is visibly and audibly raging. Inside, Bill (Mazin Elsadig), a successful middle-class artist, is working on a triptych meant to capture what he sees as the three faces of Black womanhood. His well-meaning friends Sonny-Man (Jamar Adams-Thompson) and Cynthia (L.A. Sweeney), who are invested in reclaiming their roots within the Black Is Beautiful Movement, bring him what they think is the perfect model for the third panel: Tommy (Virgilia Griffith). Burned out of her home by the riots, she arrives in hastily grabbed, mismatched clothes and a wig. She is also, we will discover, much more than an object or symbol to be painted.
Scott Penner’s set is a tour de force of immersive specificity. Floor-to-ceiling windows at left open onto the instability outside, where the glow of fires is visible at the start. Across the back lies a wall of unpainted drywall: the whole apartment is Bill’s work-in-progress. Crammed with objects, plants and lights, the space divides into three distinct zones. His working area at left features overflowing bookshelves, shelved canvases, a large desk and an easel. A lived-in couch with tastefully mismatched cushions anchors the center zone. At right lies the social zone: a fully furnished small kitchen with a table and chairs, its wall plastered with “Buy Black” posters.
Laffrenier stages the drama spatially: each character has their own domain, and their assumptions and world view feel bounded by where they stand. The kitchen is the socially mediated domain of Adams-Thompson’s leather-jacketed Sonny-Man, who feels dropped in from 1960s television, and Sweeney’s Cynthia, who is underused by the script, but makes the most of her moments counseling Tommy to be less herself. The studio is the domain of Bill, from which, separated, he looks out on reality. Elsadig’s Bill balances an attractive energy with an increasingly unsympathetic outlook: sexism and superiority grate in his accumulating “baby…” commands and belittling of “the matriarchy.” Moodie’s Oldtimer, who finds his way to the couch in the middle, provides warm comic relief (and is unquestionably the most sympathetic) as a pragmatic survivor caught between reality and representation.
Only Tommy circulates freely among these three domains, refusing containment because she doesn’t belong to any. Virgilia Griffith delivers a lyrical, lilting performance that is a fierce, tangled mix of independence and longing, despair and resilience, and shame and curiosity. Over the course of the evening, she rises from apparent object to passionate educator, sharing the grounded, lived history of her family, challenging the abstract political notions of the men around her, and teaching the audience history that most of us (myself included) are likely unaware of. It’s a lovely inhabitation of an individual subject whose complex reality will not reduce to simple symbolism.
Wine in the Wilderness is not a vast epic: it’s a small and exquisite human drama that sticks its landing. Against the backdrop of a convulsive moment in American history, Childress and Laffrenier speak to the more insidious divisions of today: the wilfully blinkered stereotypes, misogyny, and class distinctions that still shape perception within and across communities. The play challenges us to look — really look — at each other, and be deliberate and thoughtful about what we’re painting, and why.
Tommy reframes Bill’s triptych. Childress reframes Black womanhood. And this elegant production, like a glass of wine shared in our wilderness, reframes our role as spectators and participants. We have always been bound by the shared struggle for love, understanding and our full humanity. Wine in the Wilderness reminds us that we still are.
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Wine in the Wilderness plays at the Marilyn & Charles Baillie Theatre through October 4, 2026. For tickets and information, visit canadianstage.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
