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.

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.

By Alice Childress

Directed by LaChanze

Classic Stage Company