LaChanze to Make New York Directorial Debut with Alice Childress’ Wine in the Wilderness

Tony Award winner LaChanze will direct Alice Childress' Wine in the Wilderness in her New York directorial debut. The production is part of Classic Stage Company's 2024-25 season, which will also include William Inge’s Bus Stop, directed by Jack Cummings III and featuring, for the first time, an all-Asian American cast.

In Wine in the Wilderness, set against the backdrop of the 1964 Harlem riot on a hot summer night, fortune has smiled on artist Bill Jameson—his friends have just introduced him to a model for the final piece of his triptych on Black womanhood. But this woman, Tomorrow Marie, is no mere muse, and she’s about to give Bill much more than he bargained for. Wine in the Wilderness is a rarely seen play from Childress, whose drama Trouble in Mind was recently presented on Broadway, starring LaChanze. Performances will run from March through April 2025.

Bus Stop opens on a snowy night in Kansas, where a diner can be an oasis, a prison, a place to hide or a place to discover yourself. When a bus is forced to take shelter from stormy weather outside, a mismatched group of dreamers and cowboys, waitresses and outcasts find unexpected warmth in one another. Bus Stop is presented as a co-production with the National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO) and Transport Group, running from May through June 2025.

Wine in the Wilderness and Bus Stop join previously announced productions including Our Class, a transfer of the production mounted earleir this year at BAM. The play is written by Tadeusz Słobodzianek and directed by Igor Golyak, who will follow Our Class with his adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, featuring several members of the Our Class company. Our Class will run from September 12 through November 12, with The Merchant of Venice scheduled to run from November 22 through December 22.

The cast of Our Class will include Gus Birney, Andrey Burkovskiy, José Espinosa, Tess Goldwyn, Will Manning, Stephen Ochsner, Alexandra Silber, Richard Topol, Ilia Volok and Elan Zafir. The Merchant of Venice will also feature Topol (as Shylock), Birney, Espinosa, Goldwyn, Ochsner and Silber.