A place on stage for the quirky
Kirsten Greenidge aims to broaden what counts as black drama
By Megan Tench, Globe Staff | March 16, 2008
SOMERVILLE - Boston-based playwright Kirsten Greenidge still bristles when anyone describes her work as "really imaginative." And after several years of bringing her plays to stages across the country, it still stings, just a bit, to hear her characters labeled as strange, weird, or "a bunch of crazy black people," she says, smiling while sipping a cup of coffee at the Diesel Cafe.
But this busy writer and new mother says she enjoys the challenge of tackling matters of race and class, writing at times with both a gasp and a wink, while trying to reach a broad range of audiences. As an "emerging" black playwright - another label she hates - Greenidge is clear about her goals: to continue writing scripts that break away from the gospel plays and the trials of life that long defined popular black theater, and to give black actors an opportunity to perform, particularly in roles that are multidimensional and challenging.
Her work has elicited strong reactions, with some African-Americans fuming at the idea of airing dirty laundry, preferring that she represent only the best of the black community, while other observers regard her depictions of multifaceted black experiences as mere fantasy. As her play "The Gibson Girl" opens in its Boston premiere at Company One this week, Greenidge appears undaunted.
"I really do see the world that I write about in my plays," says the 33-year-old Ar lington native as she brushes a bronze-colored braid from her face. "So for people to say, 'Oh, she is really imaginative,' I go back to the space when I was 7 and I'm still playing imaginary games when other people have graduated to board games. And it's like I am the freak of this earth," she jokes. "But I am learning to take it as a compliment."
After a brief pause, she continues. "Sometimes it can make me feel like I don't see the world the way other people do," she acknowledges, "and in playwriting that can be problematic because your work has to reach other people. So if everybody feels alienated by it or that it's strange or crazy, then I ask myself, 'Am I reaching enough people?' "
Provoking thought, laughs
Small-framed and wearing red lipstick to match her sweater, Greenidge sits on a flight of stairs at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre as she watches a rehearsal. She leans over with her chin in her hands, revealing a tattoo along the small of her back, and reads her script while a group of actors run their lines, working out their places and exits.
Various scenes, including one featuring two 12-year-old girls hanging out in a bathroom stall, with Modess feminine napkins scattered around the floor, and one featuring a schizophrenic and voyeuristic janitor named Nelson, who believes he is black though he is not, are interrupted by bursts of laughter, usually followed by curious gazes from the cast to Greenidge. She doesn't seem to mind.
"I want to be a man to you," stutters Nelson (played by East Boston native Greg Maraio), a janitor at an apartment complex, to Nia (Valencia Hughes), a depressed tenant and the startled object of his affection. "I want to be a warrior king for you," he says, his voice growing louder as his body starts to jerk awkwardly. The cast laughs. "We'll make truth and beauty. In the jungle. Jungle love."
"The Gibson Girl" aims to be a thought-provoking comedy about race, seen through the lenses of black sexuality and intra-racial biases. The title comes from a popular late-19th-century series of images created by illustrator Charles Gibson that portrayed ideal beauties. The Gibson Girl, marked by her buxom figure, her slender waist, her hair piled upon her head, and her air of self assuredness, became a national icon of femininity, with variations depicted on everything from wallpaper to saucers. Men wanted women like her, and women wanted to be her, but as Greenidge points out, the Gibson Girl was an unattainable fantasy.
Greenidge's play, directed by Victoria Marsh, is a mystery surrounding two girls, one light skinned and the other dark, raised by a wacky and desperate single mother as fraternal twins. One girl is haunted by disturbing memories, and when the sisters start asking questions about their past, about the father who deserted them, their mother, Ruth, seeks out a psychic to help her lure the man back. Meanwhile, Nelson's voyeurism evolves into tentative overtures to Nia. Painful secrets are revealed as the play unfolds and the plotlines intertwine, raising troubling questions about the dynamics of beauty and skin color within the black community. Greenidge seems to be asking, "Who is the black Gibson Girl?"
'I like quirky people'
When "Gibson Girl" was about to close at the Moxie Theatre Company in San Diego two years ago, the director pulled Greenidge aside one day.
"She said, 'Oh there's been a little bit of controversy about the play,' " Greenidge recalls with a chuckle. "I was like, 'Oh?' I guess there had been a blog about how San Diego didn't need this kind of black play. This is not the kind of play that should be presented in the community."
The blogger, she says, felt that the characters in the play were a little too crazy, and they wanted more uplifting, positive images of blacks onstage.
"They are a little bit quirky, yeah, sure," Greenidge says of her characters, laughing. "I like quirky people."
There was a fleeting moment of panic, she admits, but she didn't let the negativity get her down.
"My first response was, 'Don't tell me! I don't read any reviews!' and my director said, 'This isn't a review. It's a blog.' I went into panic mode," Greenidge says. But she came to realize that people were, at the very least, having a visceral reaction to her work and talking about it - which was good.
"In a way it was comforting, because when I decided to be a playwright, I decided that I wanted to get black stories up on stage. And there are many, many, many stories, not just one. Not just everybody living in the delta South, or in the urban North. There are all these different variations in between. So to me, that is my responsibility: just getting all those stories up there, and not negating my voice."
Greenidge, an adjunct lecturer in English at Bay State College and Boston Architectural College, wasn't always this comfortable with her voice. Deciding to become a playwright was a journey all its own. She was first inspired by a school field trip to the Huntington Theatre where her seventh-grade class from Cambridge Friends School watched "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson.
"I knew I wanted to write plays, but I didn't know how to do it and I didn't know black women could do it," she says, with sudden seriousness. "I was 12 when I saw 'Joe Turner's' and I was so amazed that it was a black play. And it wasn't a musical with black people in it. I love "The Wiz," but that was my parameter on what black theater could be."
Greenidge says that when she and her two younger sisters started putting on plays in the living room for their family, she wasn't sure if the rest of the world would embrace a black female playwright, so she gave herself a pen name - one she would only describe as very English sounding.
"I was going to write only about white people," she says, smiling at the childhood memory. "I can't tell anybody my pen name. I can tell you my parents laughed me out of the car when I told them that Saturday morning. I grew out of that pretty quickly. . . . OK, I can tell you my first name was Charlotte."
Exposed to more black writers in high school and college - Wesleyan University, where she earned her bachelors degree, and the Playwright's Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she earned her masters - Greenidge says she became more determined, and so far it has paid off.
Currently a Huntington Theatre Company playwriting fellow, Greenidge has seen her plays produced on stages across the country, from Boston Playwrights' Theatre to the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. "Sans-Culottes in the Promised Land," about a black family coming to terms with issues of race and class, was presented at the prestigious Humana Festival of New American Plays in 2004. Formerly a playwright-in-residence at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., Greenidge has received commissions from South Coast Repertory, the Kennedy Center, the Guthrie Theater, and the Huntington, among others.
While reviews of her work have been mixed, the satisfaction she feels comes from many angles - not just seeing her plays come alive, but also the sheer pleasure of seeing actors who look like her lining up for auditions.
"I love auditioning, one because I am a theater geek, but two when you are in a city whether it's Boston or not, you see all of these black actors literally come out of the woodwork," she says, adding that many cities lose talented actors of all races because of a lack of opportunity. Black actors have a tougher time, she says. "If you look at what is being put onstage, well, there is this fear: I hope there are enough black actors in this city to do my work."
Over the past year, Greenidge says, she's had to turn down a couple of out-of-town workshops, largely because she and her husband were about to have their first child - Katia, their now 10-month-old daughter. But turning down work is not an easy thing to do. She worries about lulls.
"I am still what they call an emerging playwright and I think I'll be in that category for the next 20 years," Greenidge says with a sigh. "I don't want to have a huge lull. It helps a lot to think you are working on a trajectory."
And while she does have a project on the horizon with Boston Theatre Works this summer and a commission in hand from La Jolla Playhouse in California, the role she is growing into most seriously is that of mom.
"I'm just so happy to be out of the house," Greenidge says, beaming. She lovingly shows off a picture of her bubbly daughter on her cellphone. "She's a lot of fun, but it's a lot of work. This is my first long rehearsal period with her in the mix. And it is exhausting. I'm thinking of the play, meetings, and oh, I have to go home and pump milk."
© Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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