“I concentrate on portraying have-nots in a have society,” said the playwright Alice Childress, who died in 1994, at 81. A founding member of the American Negro Theatre, Childress, in 1952, became the first Black women to see her play professionally produced in New York. She was committed to depicting the realities of Black life, and focused especially on Black women. Wine in the Wilderness is a perfect example. When the artist Bill Jameson finds a model for the final piece of his triptych on Black womanhood, he believes he has everything figured out—until he realizes his muse, Tomorrow Marie, is far more complex than he expected. Set on a sweltering summer night during the Harlem riot of 1964, this rarely-performed play now takes the stage under LaChanze, who is making her New York directorial debut. Olivia Washington stars as Tomorrow and Grantham Coleman is Bill. —Jeanne Malle