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First Rehearsal for WINE IN THE WILDERNESS

© Jon Blackstock

          I use the next play I plan to direct as an example. In Alice Childress' Wine in the Wilderness, an artist is creating a triptych of black womanhood. Of course, the artist is a black man, and like men of any race, he knows what a woman is supposed to be. In the triptych, he has already painted a beautiful woman and an innocent girl. To offset these two, we wants an American black woman who has obviously lost her roots. Some friends find a woman that could model for this part, and the artist and the friends look down on her for being far less educated. You can see that the plot will turn, and while not educated, the female hero is certainly no fool. She is certainly in a situation she is not used to, and by being in the artist's apartment and being outspoken and unregretful (a Nietzschean superwoman), she creates an unusual situation for the artist. The major change is for the artist who loses his self, his ideals, and his ego. He opens up to a new perspective, and he sees all around him for the first time.
          Two questions plagued me when I found this theme for the play. One is that I am not presenting a ritual onstage. The second is what the audience gets out of seeing the actor go through a ritual. Why are these important? Before theatre, there was ritual. The Dionysian rituals became theatre but, in the beginning, kept many of these rituals through the chorus. The ritual in the modern theatre is simply that we are changing the situation, getting away from the situation out there in "the real world," and opening our perspectives to include those situations onstage. We get away from that self in which we specialize. This works for the actor who uses the "magic if" to get in the situation, and it works for the audience members who invariably think about what they would do in this situation. If the characters are presented with great craft, the audience members will often imagine themselves in the situation, and though they won't think of it in these terms, they will improvise scenes where they are in the characters' situations. Going to the theatre and being in that environment seems not unlike the experience Campbell describes when he steps off the busy sidewalks of New York into the great Catholic cathedrals. Because of the methods we use to become different characters, we get to a different plane though ritual, and if we concentrate and give ourselves as actors to the circumstances, we allow the audience members into the ritual by being a springboard for their imaginations.