A long-neglected Black classic opens Canadian Stage with a quiet, shattering look at race and misogyny

Now Canadian Stage launches its season with Childress’ 1969 play “Wine in the Wilderness,” another major work that — until recently — has been largely neglected.

What’s notable about this play is that, despite the fact that it’s set against the Harlem Riots of 1964, which began after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed Black boy in the Bronx, the main themes concern something quieter but no less destructive: namely, misogyny, classism and internalized racism within the Black community.

Bill (Mazin Elsadig) is a divorced painter who’s working on a triptych about Black womanhood for an upcoming exhibition. His first panel shows an adorable picture of a young Black girl. The second illustrates a magnificent, proud Nubian goddess, in full flower. (The paintings are by Craig Guthrie.) His third canvas is bare, but he knows what he wants to capture: a “messed-up chick,” someone who, in his words, is “unfeminine, coarse, rude and vulgar.”

During the riots, his friends Sonny-Man (Jamar Adams-Thompson) and Cynthia (L.A. Sweeney) call him from a bar, telling him that they’ve found a potential subject for the painting. And soon they show up at his door with Tommy (Virgilia Griffith), who’s sporting tacky, mismatched clothes (her home was burned in the riots), a cheap wig and seems more interested in securing a good meal and meeting an available single man than in posing for some painting.

What follows is an intriguing look at a cross section of Black humanity at that particular time, with educated, middle-class bohemians like Bill, Sonny-Man (a writer) and Cynthia (a social worker) breaking bread with factory worker Tommy and a fifth character, Oldtimer (Andrew Moodie), a hard-drinking neighbourhood fixture who’s shown up at Bill’s apartment with a bag he’s scavenged from thieves who fled the looted stores.

There’s a nod to Shaw’s “Pygmalion” in the power dynamic between Bill and Tommy. But that earlier play didn’t have to deal with the differences between the N-word (which Tommy flings around a lot) and the phrase that Bill prefers, “Afro American.”

Childress also doesn’t hold back in making Bill unsympathetic, having him begin many pronouncements with the phrase, “The problem with Black women is…” He speaks it so many times I’m surprised the opening night audience didn’t shout back at him in protest.

At a later time, Bill says “Black is beautiful,” mouthing the catch phrase that would become an empowering movement in the 1960s, a reaction to the European beauty standards that were — and let’s face it, still are — pervasive.

Tommy has a great comeback: “So how come it is I don’t feel beautiful when you talk to me?”

Director Jordan Laffrenier, who handled the nuances of race and sex brilliantly in last year’s “Slave Play,” does similarly fine work here, especially with the actors.

Moodie has a hoot as the earthy, seen-it-all elder, who brings comic relief and a great physicality to his scenes. Adams-Thompson and Sweeney make a believable groovy couple who aren’t quite aware of how condescending they’re being to Tommy. And Elsadig’s Bill, aloof to the riots happening outside his apartment, captures the artist’s anger and disdain — perhaps for the world around him, but directed at women — with chilling effectiveness.

But it’s Griffith who gets the most intriguing role, and she takes it and squeezes hard. Childress doesn’t romanticize Tommy — whose name stands for “Tomorrow Marie” — but rather gives her solid, grounded details that Griffith latches onto and owns with both tenacity and a delicate vulnerability.

Scott Penner’s crowded loft-like set and colourful costumes situate us beautifully at a particular time, without being self-conscious and overdone. And Olivia Wheeler’s sound design helps establish the riots and era (nice use of a Nina Simone song) efficiently, although there’s one early moment when Bill answers the phone and the outside noises quieten down that seems odd.

Filled to the brim with a rich, complex nectar, this “Wine” goes down smoothly and casts a warm, tender glow in its final, life-affirming tableau.