Milk Like Sugar
Roberts Theater
Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA
February 23, 2016
January 29-February 27, 2016
Wow. This is the kind of play I’ve been hoping would surface in Boston and should have long before this. Several young African-American actors, up to the minute culturally relevant themes, music, and staging.
Kirsten Greenridge’s Milk Like Sugar aims a blunderbuss at the teenage experience. Identity, values, self esteem, individuality vs. groupthink, finding love, family dynamics dysfunctional and otherwise, relationships, teen pregnancy…I mean, we’re all over the place.
The fact that the characters are often sketches or stereotyped doesn’t matter a jot. They’re so well acted, feel so authentic, that I was caught up from scene to scene, rooting for Annie, the lead, to find a way to moor herself to her own reality and plan a future that she chooses, not the dead end kind that her friends or her mother try to influence her to take. Having the straight thinking Annie follow their path would legitimize the shallow choices and compromises they’ve made themselves.
The multicultural cast hits it out of the ballpark.
Annie Desmond (Jasmine Carmichael) balancing her loyalty to her friends with the nascent belief that life is about more than babies and boyfriends that her high school pals revolve around; Margie (Carolina Sanchez) whose goal in life is to have someone of her own to love, a child of her own to give the love she's never experienced; Talisha (Shazi Raja), who will suffer any indignity to be Number One on “Her boy’s" list and flames anyone whose values differ from hers; Myra (Ramona Lisa Alexander) Annie’s single mother who long ago extinguished ambition or hope that she could amount to anything just like she snuffs out the cigarettes she incessantly smokes; Malik (Marc Pierre), possible choice to become the father of Annie’s child but focused on getting into college as a way out of the cycle of poverty and addiction; Antwoine (Matthew J. Harris) the young tattoo artist employed to give the three girls the same tattoo to bind them together in a pregnancy pact and a man with his own failed dream that haunts him; and Keera (Shanae Burch) the nerdy classmate whose connection with the steadiness of church life seems to represent salvation, love and a sense of belonging to the love starved Annie.
The play’s pace often feels frenetic, nearly off the rails with rapid fire incisive and provocative teen speak. The slower paced moments between Annie and Malik and Annie and her mother represent what Greenridge sees as the social and emotional gulf between parent and child and young men and women in the black experience.
The final scenes are touching. I’m not so sure that even Greenridge finds a satisfying resolution in the play’s last scene but when everything before it is so powerfully wrought, she gets a pass from me for alluding to a sense of hope that somehow this girl Annie has the inner core to withstand whatever obstacles life has in store for her.
What else? The play’s set - bright aluminum fencing, with sliding gates ingeniously incorporated into it, lines the back, offers characters entry and exit, and cantilevers over the stage - fits the sense of social imprisonment the characters live in. The hip-hop music, short vibrant dance routines, and social interplay seem like a page right out of a high school hallway…a chameleon corridor that can be carefree hilarious or as mean and snarky as the ones you remember but way more devastating. There is only one way to be cool. Woe to the kid like Keera who bucks the tide.
The production is one solid piece of work. Costumes/attire by Junghyn Georgia Lee fit the characters’ personalities as well as it fits their bodies. M.L. Dogg’s sound design is what you hear blaring from a teenage driver’s radio. M. Bevin O’Gara finds the right touch with staging, casting, and tone.
Greenridge has a broad appeal. The audience tonight was the most diverse in terms of race and age I’ve ever seen in Boston. Boston producers, please pay attention.
Milk Like Sugar proves that Greenridge, a Waltham, MA, resident, has her fingers on the pulse of her generation...and an alluring possibility of things to come from her pen.
L Ramona Lisa Alexander and Jasmine Carmichael in Milk Like Sugar
R Carolina Sanchez, Jasmine Carmichael, and Shazi Raja in Milk Like Sugar
Photos courtesy of Huntington Theater
Great article. I want to see it.
Did you send it to them? Or to the Globe?
ms
Posted by: Mary Seppi | February 25, 2016 at 03:40 PM
Great review pt. I am not going to the theatre these days, hope to go back soon. However that review makes me want to see the play. Nice work.
Ann
Posted by: Ann Baker | February 25, 2016 at 05:00 PM
Began reading and saw that diversity word…click gone! Not feeling good but expected, that you would view art/entertainment from the prism of diversity.
Posted by: Jeff Piccoli | February 25, 2016 at 05:05 PM