Stage Center Studio Theatre presented Wine in the Wilderness, a play by Alice Childress. Although written by and mostly for African-Americans in 1969, this play tackles universal social and personal problems.
The play’s lead characters are an artist and his future model. Bill (Olumide Said) is working on his triptych, a set of three paintings which he has titled “Wine in the Wilderness.” Tommy (Delicia Dunham), is a girl who lost her home in a fire the previous night, and is looking for the one who is going to love her the way she is. Cynthia and Sonny (Cynthia Chambers and Malcolm Johnson) are a married couple who meet Tommy at a bar and comfort her. Knowing that their friend Bill is looking for a model for his last portrait, they bring Tommy to the artist’s studio.
With her very first appearance in Bill’s house, we see that Tommy is different. She is “What a real black woman should be,” as he says to her in. She is natural and voluptuous. At first, he thinks of her as the bad girl who needs to take the place on his third painting. His three paintings represent innocence, an ideal woman and the actual African-American woman, an ugly product of the society.
Meeting Tommy, Bill does not look deep down into her nature. He has ideas of three types of women and directly applies them to the women he meets. The young girl on the first painting represents innocence, the second, well dressed and accessorized is the “queen of Africa,” the ideal woman. Then the third – the natural one – is the real product of society, and because of this, not the ideal female. It has been this way before and it continues to be so. For many men, the existent, natural woman is not the ideal one, but the idealized once they see on TV, commercials and magazines.
This comes to show us how unfairly we stereotype people, and do not look beneath the surface. Furthermore, Bill comically says that a man is looking to defend his manhood, and a woman should understand that and not be so eager to know and do everything. Which is a good remark, but it is not relevant today because the modern woman wants to know and do a lot more.
At the end, Bill discovers that the real wine in the wilderness is Tommy, the ordinary, down to the earth woman, who will pour you a glass of wine without hesitations. Nevertheless, wine was the drink of the gods. However, according to Persian mythology, a woman discovered it and the first deities of wine were women.