Wine in the Wilderness is a 1969 play by Alice Childress set in Harlem during the 1964 riots. It’s currently playing at Canadian Stage Berkeley Street in a production directed by Jordan Laffrenier (who also directed Slave Play). It’s a deceptively complex and nuanced analysis of the intersection of race, class and gender in the African-American community at a time of considerable change. The Civil Rights Movement is under way. Educational opportunities have opened up enough to allow the emergence of an aspirational African-American middle class. But this is still a deeply racist USA with police brutality a common occurrence and plenty of people left behind in an increasingly polarized African-American community.
By the Word Productions premiered Franca Miraglia’s American Devotion in the Studio at Crow’s Theatre on Thursday. The playwright imagines what might have happened if Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe had invited Norman Mailer and his wife over for dinner or drinks at their Connecticut farmhouse.
