A Pedagogical Approach to Understanding Rioting as Revolutionary Action in Alice Childress’s Wine in the Wilderness

Leading spokesmen (for the most part they were men) of the Black Arts Movement frequently asserted that the attainment of revolutionary consciousness required the complete upheaval and demolition of Eurocentric values.¹ The impulse to upset the status quo by redefining conceptions of (black) beauty and dismantling commodity culture drove the proliferation of urban uprisings in black communities across the nation during the 1960s, and the representation of urban uprisings in Black Arts Movement plays.² Illuminating the similar motives of black aestheticians and rioters, Alice Childress’s Wine in the Wilderness (1969) opens in the midst of a riot. By reifying the ideology of the movement, the play allows instructors to have a conversation about the Black Arts Movement in general, the connection between aesthetics and politics, and the historical and social circumstances that underpinned the movement. The rioting within Wine in the Wilderness demonstrates how notions of liberal subjectivity predicated on self-determination circumscribe a revolution in consciousness geared toward collective transformation. It also calls attention to the paradox at the heart of Black Arts Movement ideology: on the one hand, the movement advocated for black nationalism and a sense of collectivity, and on the other, a revolution in consciousness, as defined by the movement, is a decidedly individual process.³ This essay singularly argues that the representations of rioting within Childress’s play, alongside the writings of Sonia Sanchez and Ben Caldwell, mimetically communicate black aestheticians’ self-conscious acknowledgment of the contradictions underpinning coming to revolutionary consciousness (65).

The typical Black Arts Movement course or survey of African American drama may not include Childress’s work. This omission occurs despite the fact that her playwriting career spanned five decades and included an Obie Award (1954), nominations for a Tony Award (1944), and the Pulitzer Prize (1981). Not knowing where to position Childress within the history of twentieth-century American theatre, historians often leave her out of their accounts of specific periods or movements (such as the Black Arts Movement).⁴ Complicating matters, Childress frequently wrote plays that were ahead of her time—plays that often foreshadowed, by as much as a decade, the critiques of future artists. For example, her play Trouble in Mind (1956) anticipates the Black Arts Movement’s (1965–75) critique of the literature of the civil rights period. With this essay, I hope to restore Childress’s place in academic syllabi, the Black Arts Movement, and the larger American theatrical canon.

Similar to Childress’s other plays, Wine in the Wilderness stages a verbal altercation that results in a shift in consciousness. The argument, between the street-smart, high-spirited Tomorrow-Marie, known as Tommy, and the condescending, chauvinistic male protagonist Bill Jameson, occurs over their class and gender differences. The play depicts the development of a relationship between Tommy—a woman driven from her home by rioting—and Bill—a visual artist raised in the suburbs who aspires to educate the masses through his triptych titled “Wine in the Wilderness.” The triptych’s three paintings consist of “Black Girlhood,” “‘Wine in the Wilderness’ . . . Mother Africa, regal, black womanhood in her noblest form,” and the “Messed-up Chick” (Wine 347, 348). At the start of the play, Bill has finished the first two parts of the triptych and needs a model for the third part. His friends Sonny-Man and Cynthia meet Tommy in a bar and think she will serve as the perfect model for the final painting—the messed-up chick. The play depicts Bill’s attempt to paint this demoralized, downtrodden, societal-leech caricature, using Tommy as his model. The turning point in the play occurs when Tommy learns about her role in the triptych. Tommy calls into question Bill, Sonny-Man, and Cynthia’s assumptions about her and themselves. The separation along class lines, central to the culmination of the play, mirrors the divide between the characters in Bill’s apartment and the rioters they reference.

From the beginning, the play draws attention to the productive way black feminism questions some of the central...