Susan M. West
What the Wine Sellers Buy
Performance: 3:00 pm, November 8, 2009
Ron Milner’s What the Wine Sellers Buy was undoubtedly the worst play I have seen performed at TSU. The play dealt with the longstanding theme of drugs and prostitution, and the tempting of the young by close, older acquaintances in that young person’s life.
According to the TSU website, the play was set in the streets of Detroit in the 1950s. Someone apparently forgot to tell the director that cordless phones weren’t used in the 50s, nor did the hippie’s look of the 70s exist. Since the play was written in the 1974, one would wonder if the director, or the writer, made those mistakes.
On a larger scale, the setting was well constructed. TSU’s theatre workforce did a good job creating the look of the boarding house kitchen and Mae’s bedroom. The stage was complete with street scenes and house parties, along with the main kitchen and bedroom areas. There was a creative mix of set changes and the actors transformed well, except for the all too often stumbling or tripping over a prop. I liked that all scenes took place without complete darkness or curtain drops in between, except that Act 1 was two hours long. When the final scene of that act concluded, the audience had no clue whether it was intermission or if the play had ended. One audience member actually got up and asked an usher if the play was over. I waited all too anxiously for the actors to appear for their bow, but to my disappointed the play soon resumed and lasted another hour. Fortunately, the last hour was much better than the first two, and the wait for the end wasn’t unbearable.
The costumes were all too 70s in appearance. Rico, the pimp, looked like he had stepped right out of That 70s Show, with his pink leisure suit and burgundy hat. Mae and the other girls were also dressed a couple of decades in the future for the play to have taken place in the 50s. I’m not sure if there was a make-up artist, or if the actors did their own make-up because both moms in the play looked like college students. In fact, all the actors resembled college students, so it was hard to tell how old anyone was supposed to be.
In all fairness, the actors were fine. Ashley Bishop showed signs of excellent acting skills, except for her smiles to the other actors in between her serious lines. No one stumbled, over lines anyway, and most seemed very familiar with their parts. There was, however, a sense of separation between the actors and their performances. Though they were good, they didn’t seem to really relate to their characters.
The play dragged on and on with most characters spewing cuss word after cuss word. After a while, I wasn’t sure if the language was in the script, or just the actors adding their own flavor to the characters. The play was a collage of f-words, n-words, and p-words, most often making no statement or adding anything to the meaning of the play.
The comic relief was the “wino” scenes in the streets. The first time it was very funny, but by the third time I saw the scene repeated, and heard the p-word spouted excessively, I began to feel offended as a woman. I actually wondered if Milner was a misogynist. I felt this way a number of times, especially being introduced to Mae’s mom, who was portrayed as self absorbed and uncaring for no apparent reason. Personally, I think the writer had no perception of what it must be like to be a single mom raising three girls. “Not there for Mae?” I hardly believe mom was not there for Mae, when looking at her room, one could plainly see Mae had been well cared for. One must not forget Mae was a teenager, and teenage girls are almost never satisfied with parental, especially mom’s, care.
Milner obviously had little idea of what it takes for a good male role model, too. Though he tried with the deacon character, (Melvin, I think), he made him seem distant and casual. Police were corrupt, dads were absent, and Rico was a drug dealing pimp. True, some of this was necessary for the theme of the play, but there was a lingering feeling of little hope of Steve ever rising above his circumstances, even though he eventually came to his senses. The male characters had mixed ideas of right and wrong, and there was no one to really show Steve how to make it.
The play depicted the “same ole” theme of a poor boy in the projects tempted by his surroundings as he struggles to rise above them. Only in this play, Steve’s circumstances rambled on through too many repetitious scenes, too many f-words and n-words, and not enough substance to make the play meaningful. Even the metaphor of “what the wine sellers buy” didn’t get captured in a sense that would make it memorable or important. Too bad, too, it was clever.
I was disappointed and rolled my eyes more than once, as I sat through three hours of something I could have watched on TV, minus the bad language. TSU plays are usually rich in history or present strong statements of African American struggles in a world that often fights against them. There was no strong statement in What the Wine Sellers Buy except, “why”. Why did Marc Payne choose this one and why didn’t anyone stop him?

