“A theatre always makes me feel that way, gotta get still for a second.”—Alice Childress, Trouble in Mind
I like Chekhov. A lot. Take some relatively ordinary characters (think me or you), place them against a crumbling world (look outside, go online, look outside again), make their lives not quite amount to what they expected (look at us!) and you have the workings of play.
But what I like most about Chekhov is his ability to take ordinary, relatable characters, and make them extraordinary. He does this through an understanding that everyone is both all that is good in this world and all that is bad in this world; in each of us exists a reflection of the world’s compassion as well as its heartlessness. And through that lens we see nuance. Complexity. Everyday life.
Alice Childress is not Chekhov. She’s not even trying to be. But her protagonists could read a Chekhov play and recognize themselves.
Wiletta, the protagonist of her play Trouble in Mind, would recognize in Uncle Vanya her experience of waking up to years spent in a system that never intended to value her, working within an institution that demands her labour but cannot see her humanity, all while wondering if her most meaningful days are gone.
Julia, from Wedding Band, would meet Three Sisters’ Masha and understand how societal circumstances make the life they both long for impossible, that no matter how enormous their love feels to them, it may not ever be bigger than the world’s cruelty.
And Tommy, from Wine in the Wilderness, is a woman who would read Uncle Vanya and understand Sonya loving someone that doesn’t love her back, waking up each morning and feeling it indistinguishable from the last, life continually asking everything of her but only occasionally giving anything in return. She knows what it means to live in a world of disappointment, but to get up the next day anyway.
Why compare Childress to Chekhov?
Childress does not need Chekhov to certify her greatness. Let’s be clear: she is perfectly great on her own. The comparison exposes an imbalance in how we recognize greatness and who we permit ourselves to recognize at all.
I’m constantly confronting a version of the same question. I invite someone to a show. The main character doesn’t look like them. And they ask, “What does this show have to do with me?”
We’ve spent more than a century practicing how to see ourselves in Chekhov. We’ve been taught that the woes of provincial Russians are as universal as our own. And I think this is a good thing. I feel myself expanding as I recognize myself in someone I thought I had no ability to recognize myself in.
“You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoevsky. This is a very great liberation for the… person who always thinks that he is alone.”—James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin
We rarely extend the imagination that we use to see ourselves in Chekhov to writers like Alice Childress. What would happen if we did? What might we find out about ourselves, if we searched for ourselves within Childress’ work? Why do we understand Chekhov, who specifically wrote to excite the hearts of provincial Russians, as universal, but Alice Childress writing about a Black community in Harlem, as relegated to that community?
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Place Childress next to her regularly produced contemporaries and the imbalance becomes even more clear.
Born in 1912 in Charleston, South Carolina, Alice Childress is as deserving of a sustained production as anyone else. She understands the freedom of desire and the hunger of the heart as well as Tennessee Williams. Like Arthur Miller, she can set a play in a time of political unrest, decades before her own life, with such precision that it confronts not only the politics of her time but continues to penetrate the politics of ours. In a single Chekhovian breath, she can hold tragedy next to comedy, love next to despair, loneliness next to togetherness.
And yet, her work has repeatedly been denied the institutional life granted to other playwrights.
In 1955, Trouble in Mind was set to be the first play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway, but producers cancelled the run when she refused to soften the white characters. Its Broadway premiere did not happen until 2021, years after her death. In his New York Times review of that belated production, Jesse Green deemed the play “timeless.” The same year, Philip Akin directed an affecting staging of Trouble in Mind at the Shaw Festival.
Childress wrote Wedding Band in 1962. In a recent conversation I had with Kathy Perkins, a Childress expert and collaborator, we discussed why the first production never continued to Broadway. Producers felt the play would be more appealing to a Broadway audience if it focused on the white characters instead of the Black characters. Childress refused; the play wouldn’t premiere Off-Broadway until 1972, and it wouldn’t see another live audience in New York until 2022. Stage Door described a 2023 Stratford Festival production as a “masterpiece,” and the Toronto Star gave it four out of four stars. It still has not been performed on Broadway.
Wine in the Wilderness will only receive its Canadian premiere this September, at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre. I’m directing the production, and I’d never heard of the play until I found it in the library. I wish I’d heard of it sooner. Somewhere there is a river of scripts that have been excluded from stages because they weren’t seen as the right colour.
Childress spent her career fighting the historic and systematic racism that pushed the idea that Black life was less universal and therefore less essential. Her plays did not make it as far as she intended them to in her lifetime because she refused to consent to the idea that universal means white.
The brilliance of Childress’ work is that she understands our lives are shaped both by forces acting on us and forces moving quietly within us. She focuses her plays on the internal things that feel impossible for all of us to face: our shames, our desires, our self-hatred, and all the ways we are made to feel completely alone.
Childress understood the theatre as a place where hidden parts of us could be revealed. She understood that art comes not just from the audience being mirrored — that great art doesn’t reflect our humanity back at us, but expands it. It is not about a character looking like me, or being like me, it is about a character being larger than me and in turn me finding things that are larger and more complex in myself from witnessing them.
That expansion feels even more urgent now in a culture that is designed to give us more and more of what we like. While algorithms are recycling our every pleasure back at us, removing friction, catering the ultimate supposedly relatable experience, theatre has the ability to do something vital: to show us what we haven’t seen previously, both in ourselves and in others. It has the ability to say something we haven’t heard before, that isn’t being tailored for us.
That is what Alice Childress’ work does so well. It doesn’t reduce us to a passive, familiar, viewing experience; it wants us to break beyond the shells of our hearts.
This is the type of theatre we should be fighting to preserve. This is the kind of art that can’t be reduced to a thumbnail.
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Wine in the Wilderness takes place during the Harlem uprising of 1964, but it could take place today. Outside the studio of Bill, a middle-class painter, police brutality has incited a riot. But that brutality and the conditions that led to the riot — red lining, forced migration, the brutal conditions of decaying Harlem and the daily humiliations that Black people faced from the police — are never mentioned. Childress is more interested in the characters’ internal struggles.
In his apartment, Bill — played at Canadian Stage by Mazin Elsadig — is creating an artwork that is going to change the way his audience sees themselves and the world around them. For his triptych on Black womanhood, he believes he needs one final figure: a woman broken by poverty and neglect. His goal is to make a statement with his art, to make an impact on his community and incite change. His friends bring him Tommy, played by Virgilia Griffith, believing she will perfectly encapsulate the degradation Bill wants to paint. Bill and his friends consider themselves sophisticated: they understand the language of Black liberation, the value of art, history, and education. But they refuse to truly see the woman standing right in front of them.
Growing up, my mother worked three jobs to keep us fed. I often find myself in circles with artists now that grew up in a very different economic situation than I did. I used to feel ashamed about these experiences, shame I did not know how to recognize or deal with. What I love about Alice is that she finds humanity in both the middle-class artist who is striving to make his vision into a reality; and in the working class who may feel they only have time to work, that their struggles have been overly intellectualized by artists and elites, and who more than anything just want to be loved and understood for who they are.
In 1888, Chekhov wrote to his publisher that writers deal with questions not answers, that an artist observes, guesses, but doesn’t answer the questions, just formulates them correctly. Childress grants her characters the same contradictions. Bill’s ambition is sincere; Tommy isn’t defined by suffering. Childress allows us to see ourselves on both sides of pointing the finger: among those who have been dismissed and those who haven’t seen another person clearly.
The question isn’t whether Tommy looks like us, but whether we are willing to do the work to see ourselves in her. Whether we are willing to let ourselves become larger and more contradictory than we believed possible. Tommy, Wiletta, and Julia are as complicated as any of the characters who ever sat in a country house waiting for a life that did not arrive.
Theatre shouldn’t recycle our humanity back to us. It should expand what our definition of humanity can be.
Wine in the Wilderness runs from September 19 to October 4 at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre. Tickets are available here.
Canadian Stage is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Jordan Laffrenier
Jordan Laffrenier is an award-winning director, dramaturg, producer, and educator. Jordan is currently the associate artistic director of Canadian Stage and Prime Mover Theatre Company and the former artistic producer of Theatre Sheridan.
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