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.