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Insight News • January 22, 2024 - January 28, 2024 • Page 1
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Insight News
January 22, 2024 - January 28, 2024
Vol. 51 No. 4• The Journal For Community News, Business & The Arts • insightnews.com
Penumbra presents Alice Childress’
Wine In The Wilderness WINE IN THE WILDERNESS Directed by Lou Bellamy One Act, Drama 3 men, 2 women, off-stage voice Total Cast: 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-8222-4395-3 First produced as part of a special experimental series of Black drama, the compelling and highly imaginative play Wine In The Wilderness by Alice Childress speaks eloquently of the Black experience in America. Acclaimed writer Alice Childress delivers a frank
portrait of Black women’s identity, seen from outside and inside. As an uprising rocks his Harlem neighborhood, artist Bill Jameson is focused on finishing his latest work: paintings representing three types of Black womanhood. But the arrival of an unexpected muse challenges his artistic vision and reveals his shallow assumptions. With humor and heart, Childress takes on class, patriarchy, and the artist’s role within the community. This is the playwright at her most
revolutionary and essential. As described in the Boston Herald Traveler: “The drama was woven around a young girl, played by Abbey Lincoln, befriended by an artist looking for a model of a grassroots woman, ignorant and unattractive, for his triptych. It opens amidst Negro riots that have burned the girl out of her apartment and Abbey gets off a few cracks that hit home when the artist and his friends haul out the Afro-American bit by crying, ‘The Afro-Americans
burnt down my home. They holler ‘Whitey’ but who did they burn down—me!’ There were many poignant moments as the two were magnetically drawn together and pushed apart. Abbey’s fear of falling in love with the artist, his desire to hold her there only long enough to paint her for his triptych, her disillusionment when she finds out, from Old Timer, one of the neighborhood’s characters, that he wants a woman who’s ugly and ignorant for his model. What Wine In The Wilderness captured
was the turmoil Blacks feel, the pretenses they assume—like wearing straight-haired wigs— the looting of their own people in a riot—something Old Timer rationalized in a humorous manner.” But something which, like the other deeply felt revelations in the play, goes directly and surely to the heart of the racial dilemma. Wine In The Wilderness at Penumbra Theatre, 270 N. Kent Street, St. Paul, MN, runs from February 20 thru March 17, 2024.
Single tickets and subscriptions are now on sale to the public. Purchase online or call 651.224.3180 (M-F, 10am4:30pm) Included in Broadway Book Club’s Black Voices Specialty Collection “…a superb and shattering drama of raw emotions.” — Boston Herald Traveler. “…the perfect premiere for his ambitious local project.” —Boston Globe.