Imagine that Henry Higgins was a Black artist living in a Harlem tenement in 1964, and that he took Eliza Dolittle on as a project not to make her a proper lady, but rather to capture everything that made him look down on her, for posterity. Now picture this young woman turning the tables, as Eliza did on Henry, but with an even greater impact, so that she essentially became the artist’s teacher, imparting both wisdom and humility. 

I’m not sure if Alice Childress had “Pygmalion” in mind when she wrote “Wine in the Wilderness,” the 1969 play that evokes (for me) this premise, but Childress certainly shared Shaw’s abiding interest in what we now call social justice — though of course, the time in which she lived and her personal circumstances led her to channel it in a different context.