In the Wine Time by Ed Bullins

First produced: 1968, at the New Lafayette Theatre, New York, New York

First published: 1969

Type of work: Play

Type of plot: Naturalism

Time of work: Early 1950’s

Locale: A side street in a large, northern, industrial city

Principal Characters:

• Cliff Dawson, an unemployed Navy veteran
• Lou Dawson, Cliff’s wife, who is three months pregnant
• Ray, Lou and Cliff’s nephew, a quiet, good-hearted, sensitive boy

The Play

The play begins with a moderately long prologue, which may be likened to a soliloquy, spoken years later by the adult Ray. This device provides a context that distances the action that follows, sets the urban scene, gives a wistful tone, introduces the special, inward, and sensitive personality of Ray, and establishes his experience and point of view as the focus of attention and meaning. In poetic prose, Ray shares his memory of what for him has turned out to be the most meaningful event of his last “wine time” summer, his daily, brief meetings with a mysterious girl with whom he fell in love. By the end of that summer, she had moved away, and he had turned sixteen and joined the Navy.

The three acts of the play then take the form mainly of dialogue between family members and friends in a working-class neighborhood; the characters are entertaining themselves with large quantities of talk and wine after another trying day. Men and women talk to one another about their relationships, men talk with men about women, and women talk with women about men. The audience senses the hidden agendas in these conversations. Themes emerge, such as the ways in which lives are molded by the pressures of poverty and racism, the nature of true manhood and the ways in which it might involve women and family, and potential and loss.

The action takes place mostly on the Dawson family’s stoop, but sometimes the stage lighting shifts the scene to “the Avenue,” where a mirroring subplot takes place. Act 1 tells the audience what it needs to know about Cliff and Lou Dawson and their adopted nephew, Ray, and presents some options that might be available for Ray. It also presents the conflicts between and within Cliff and Lou. These conflicts are echoed and aggravated by conflicts between these characters and various minor characters. In act 2, the option of “the girl” is presented along with the conflict within Ray, and the earlier established conflicts are heightened. In act 3, the conflicts and themes are quickly brought to a crisis that is just as quickly resolved by violence.

The action all takes place on a single hot summer night. As usual, Cliff, Lou, and Ray are out on their stoop, talking and drinking cheap wine. From time to time, they are joined by friends and acquaintances. Their neighbors are also out on their stoops, frowning on Cliff, whom they consider loud and crude. Cliff is equally annoyed by his neighbors, whom he considers snobbish, pretentious, and small-minded. The Dawsons are comparatively new arrivals on Derby Street, and from the beginning of their time there, Cliff has felt rejected and insulted by his neighbors, who think it suspicious and disgraceful that Cliff is a college student, and unemployed, while Lou rears a teenage boy. In his bitterness, Cliff frequently entertains himself by making a nuisance of himself, shocking his neighbors by drunkenly shouting obscenities and insults. Lou somewhat shares his attitude toward their neighbors, but she is more understanding of their viewpoint and is uncomfortable with her husband’s displays, as well as with his roughness toward her. To some extent, she shares and enjoys his roughness; she feels proud of his strength and superior vitality, and she is proud of herself for having saved him from a worse fate in the Navy by marrying him. Cliff is not entirely satisfied with his landlocked domestic life. Although he knows that he has had his time of adventure and must put that behind, he still takes out his frustration in quarrels with his wife, sometimes with only partly mocked violence. He loves, respects, and even admires his wife for her sensitivity and high principles, which he has found to be rare.

When Ray expresses his desire to join the Navy when he turns sixteen, in just a week, Cliff encourages him and promises to sign his enlistment papers. Lou, though, says that Ray is a year too young. While Lou is indoors washing her hair, Ray and Cliff talk about the opportunities for a more meaningful life that the Navy would offer Ray, especially regarding women. Cliff learns that Ray is more experienced sexually than he had thought, although he has known about Ray and his girlfriend, Bunny.

In the context of these thoughts about women and Ray’s future, Ray mentions a new girl, beautiful and mysterious, probably somewhat older than he, whom he sees at a certain time every day on the Avenue. Each day she smiles at him and hums what has become their song. Cliff has not witnessed these trysts, but he immediately sees the threat that they present to the escape into a good life in the Navy that he has projected for Ray. He thus does what he can to disillusion Ray about the girl.

On this night, meanwhile, Bunny has been up the Avenue with her girlfriend and two young men, one of whom, Red, is making an obvious play for her attentions. While Cliff and Ray are gone to buy more wine, Bunny, Red, and other friends and neighbors, with their jug of wine, gather at the Dawsons’ stoop. Tension rises, especially because of Red’s provocations; and after Cliff and Ray return with a new jug, which is already half empty, the mood grows steadily darker. Ray drinks himself into a near stupor, but he is able to understand when Bunny informs him that she is Red’s girl now. Red urinates into an empty jug and hands it to Ray. As Ray raises it to his lips, Bunny knocks it away, smashing it on the sidewalk. Ray punches her in the face, and Red jumps on Ray. Knives are drawn, and fighting swirls around the stoop and into the alley. Cliff runs out of the house and into the darkness. When he emerges, he announces that he has killed Red. A policeman arrives and places Cliff under arrest.

Critical Context

In the Wine Time was the first of a cycle of twenty plays, with characters linked by kinship or association, projected by Bullins about the black American experience in the twentieth century. It was also his first full-length play. Before it was first produced in 1968, critics had acknowledged the talent Bullins had displayed in his one-act plays, but In the Wine Time was not widely noted in its first production; it has, however, come to be considered to be one of his most important plays. Along with Amiri Baraka, whom Bullins has said “created me,” Bullins led the black theater movement of the 1960’s.

From the beginning, Bullins has been interested primarily in his plays’ reception not by critics but by black audiences. His purpose, he has suggested, is to provide black theatergoers with fresh insights as they consider the weight of their own lives. His passionate conviction is that black playwrights can and should contribute a vision for tomorrow, thereby building not only a new black theater but also a black nation and future. With this commitment and audience, Bullins has found it artistically possible to present anything he envisions for the judgment of that audience, free from the constraints of white publishers and critics. Furthermore, while the problem of racism is often present and meaningful in his plays, its presence need not be central or blatant, because he is not bringing it to the attention of white theatergoers or explaining it to them. Therefore, too, his plays can be free from ideology and political or revolutionary rhetoric.

Still, Bullins writes for change. As the critic Don Evans has pointed out, the mirror that the plays hold up to the audience shows black people their ugliness. Indeed, Bullins’s early plays were rejected by some critics for their obscene language, unconventional style, and violent, unflattering pictures of black life. Bullins, however, has remarked that he was a conscious artist before he was a consciously revolutionary artist and that he is thus able to act as an agent for change in the black community. Bullins’s plays force black audiences to look at those parts of their communities that trouble themselves and to examine their own choices, dreams, evasions, and self-delusions.

In the Wine Time suggests that persons may dream the right dreams of peace and union but may be too naïve, unimpassioned, or misled to realize them. The play also explores how persons may try vainly to bring dead dreams back to life or may dream the wrong dreams and make choices that restrict their own freedom. Whether the dream be the American Dream or an individual’s personal dream, it is ambiguous and fragile and may suddenly turn into a nightmare.

Bullins has remarked that his characters are, like most persons, many dimensional and ever-changing in an ever-changing universe, like points in a dreamlike vision. This sense of the dreamlike quality of the universe and of persons’ lives and visions crosses with Bullins’s naturalistic dramatic techniques to influence the way he structures his plays. Some critics have faulted his plays for lack of conventional form and focused point of view; some have, upon greater reflection, discovered an unconventional form in the plays; some have found a free form that is vigorous and delightful, exhibiting artistic freedom and assurance; and others have explained that the plays are structured by an awareness of space and by quasi-ritualistic patterns that are recognized by black audiences as reflections of their own experiences and community patterns.

Bibliography

Anderson, Jervis. “Profiles.” The New Yorker 49 (June 16, 1973): 40-44. Presents the complexities of the artist in the context of his personal background, the Black Arts movement, and the New Lafayette Theatre.

Andrews, W. D. E. “Theater of Black Reality: The Black Drama of Ed Bullins.” Southwest Review 65 (1980): 178-190. Asserts that, in contrast to Baraka’s “Messianic” theater, Bullins offers an “Orphic” descent into ghetto depths. Notes that the abstract sense of menace in his plays is like that found in the plays of Harold Pinter.

Bullins, Ed. “An Interview with Ed Bullins: Black Theater.” Interview by Marvin X. Negro Digest 18 (April, 1969): 9-16.

Cook, William. “Mom, Dad, and God: Values in the Black Theatre.” In The Theater of Black Americans, edited by Errol Hill. Vol. 1. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980. Compares Bullins’ portrayal of family members, especially the father figure, to Lorraine Hansberry’s and James Baldwin’s. Argues that Bullins’ characters do not fear sex or feel religious inhibitions; they celebrate the possibilities in ghetto street life, with a stoic acceptance of those few pleasures that life affords.

DiGaetani, John L. “Ed Bullins.” In A Search for a Postmodern Theater: Interviews with Contemporary Playwrights. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Evans, Don. “The Theater of Confrontation: Ed Bullins Up Against the Wall.” Black World 23 (April, 1974): 14-18. Claims that Bullins is not pessimistic about the struggle of black men, but he must show the frustrating impotence that they feel.

Hay, Samuel A. Ed Bullins: A Literary Biography. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997.

Sanders, Leslie. “Ed Bullins.” In American Playwrights Since 1945, edited by Philip C. Kolin. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. A survey of sources, information, and major ideas about Bullins’ work.

Smitherman, Geneva. “Everybody Wants to Know Why I Sing the Blues.” Black World 23 (April, 1974): 4-13. Examines how, from the oral tradition of black literature, Bullins brings the trickster figure and the blues motif. Notes that as a bluesman, he reexamines black experience and moves to transcend its brutal aspects.

Steele, Shelby. “White Port and Lemon Juices: Notes on Ritual in the New Black Theater.” Black World 22 (June, 1973): 4-13, 78-83. Argues that Bullins’ use of symbols, characterizations, themes, and language styles establishes a ritual pattern that is recognized by black audience members as reaffirming their values.

True, Warren R. “Ed Bullins, Anton Chekhov, and the ‘Drama Mood.’ ” College Language Association Journal 20 (June, 1977): 521-532. Compares Bullins to Chekhov with regard to their uses of naturalism of settings and passivity of characters who are trapped by social and environmental forces.