Kirsten Greenidge
Music Credit: “Renewal” written and performed by Doug and Judy Smith
Jo Reed: Here’s a synopsis of the new play Baltimore from its author Kirsten Greenidge.
Kirsten Greenidge: Baltimore is the story of Shelby. She’s a junior in college at a fictional university called Siberia University. And Shelby, who is African-American, does not have a highly developed social conscious. And she is also an RA. There’s been an incident on her hall, and it’s a racial incident, and her students want her to come home and deal with it. So throughout the course of the play, she is forced to deal with this incident in ways that she realizes she’s unprepared to do. So the play follows her story and her students’ journey as they learn to come up with language to deal with it.
Jo Reed: That was playwright Kirsten Greenidge. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed.
Baltimore is the latest work from the prolific and award-winning author Kirsten Greenidge. Her many plays include The Luck of the Irish, Splendor, Bossa Nova, and Milk Like Sugar, which won a 2012 Obie award. While the plays occupy very different times and places, they shine a strong light on the complicated inter-workings of race, class, and gender. Greenidge works to give women and actors of color strong, multi-dimensional roles. No stereotypes. No long-suffering saints in her work, thank you very much. She creates complex, flawed characters, and the theater world has taken appreciative note.
Kirsten was a recipient of an NEA/TCG residency at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, is a Huntington Playwriting Fellow, and a recent PEN/Laura Pels award recipient. In February, she was thrice blessed. Her play Milk Like Sugar was performed at the Huntington Theatre, while a couple of miles away, her new play Baltimore was taking its inaugural bow at Boston University. And a few hundred miles further south, Baltimore was getting ready to open at the Clarice Smith Center at the University of Maryland, where it’s running until March 5th. Kirsten Greenidge has had work commissioned by theaters around the country, including The Goodman, Yale Rep, and CompanyOne. In fact, Baltimore was commissioned by the Big Ten Consortium New Play Initiative. The initiative’s purpose is simple: provide theatrical opportunities for women studying the performing arts. Here’s Kirsten with the back story.
Kirsten Greenidge: Alan MacVey at the University of Iowa, who is the chair of the Theater department there – through some conversations with his wife, who is a professor of Theater at the University of Iowa, were thinking about how a lot of times at BFA programs in the United States, there’s a disproportionate number of female students who are studying acting and performance. And how a lot of times the productions that these programs put up don’t have a lot of roles for these women, so they’re often in ensemble roles, in chorus roles, non-speaking roles. And what that means, often, is that sometimes female BFA students leave these programs without as much experiences that they could be having. And so this commissioning program is designed to create plays to address this problem. And the plays are written by female playwrights, and the plays have to have at least six roles, six speaking roles, for female performers.
Jo Reed: How did you get involved with the consortium?
Kirsten Greenidge: First of all, I went to the University of the Iowa. And so whenever they call, if I can do what they want me to do—I loved it there and—I will do almost anything that they ask me to do to give back. When I learned of the commission, when Alan called me, “Yes. What would you like me to do?” And it was almost a no brainer, because I think that gender parity is a topic that is true to my heart. You can’t learn your craft if you’re not practicing your craft. So that was a big issue for me, and that’s how the project began.
Jo Reed: What inspired Baltimore? What was the genesis of it?
Kirsten Greenidge: The genesis of it was a story told to me by Alan MacVey, a story that he experienced when he was an RA, himself. When he approached me about the commission, he said, “You can choose any topic you want to write about but we know you often write about race.” And I said, “Sure. I’d be happy to write about race.” I knew that I wanted to write a story that would be specific to college students. So I wanted it to be personal. I didn’t want it to be a topic that was so big that audience members and students couldn’t dig into it in a personal way. So I searched around for a long time, and then we came up with that story when he just shared what happened to him in college. And I think I really dug into the idea of not have resources to talk about race. That was a big thing. Because I think that is common for many people—not knowing what to say, not knowing how to enter a conversation.
Jo Reed: Jo Reed: Shelby is a 20-year-old African-American, and she keeps insisting that her generation is post-racial. And I know you teach at a university, and I’m wondering is that something that you’ve actually heard from students who are Shelby’s age?
Kirsten Greenidge: I have. Not from every student.
Jo Reed: No, clearly.
Kirsten Greenidge: I certainly have some students who are very socially and racially conscious. But I have encountered some students – I’ve taught at BU, and I’ve taught at some other colleges, as well. And I have encountered students who have experienced a bit of racial fatigue, or this feeling that, “I shouldn’t be dealing with this. This was my parents’ generation’s problem. And I don’t want to be dealing with this. And I should be dealing with how much debt I’m going to be encountering after I get out of college. I should be dealing with finding a job out of college, but I shouldn’t be delaying with this. I should be dealing with how people are going to meet me as an individual.” And that, I think, is where Shelby stands. And so it’s being really uncomfortable with the idea that the race “problem” is still around. And I think Shelby and students like her who are in the real world, not the theatrical world, are frustrated that this is still a problem. And probably because they’re growing up in a world where—you know the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was passed before they were born—are possibly not as cognizant of a world where civil rights was a new concept. The idea that everybody in America, that everybody is a person and has rights is a relatively new concept. And so Shelby and people in Shelby’s generation who are experiencing this type of fatigue and this point of world view, I think, are living in a bit of a vacuum or ahistorical world view where they’re unable to realize, “Wait a minute. This is a new concept that we’re dealing with that everybody has rights. And that not everybody is adjusting to that idea in a graceful way.”
Jo Reed: You made the decision, in terms of who we’re seeing on the stage; it’s not just black kids and white kids. You brought in other voices who are also typically seen as outsiders and also not seen on the stage very often. Shelby’s best friend is Asian-American. One of the kids in the dorm is Hispanic, another guy has two mothers, etc., etc.
Kirsten Greenidge: Yes. Yes. It was important to me to make sure that we weren’t getting a black and white vision on stage—that the cast was diverse. That we were getting as varied points of view as possible, because that was very important. And I almost wish I could have gone further, and at some point it became a question of how many voices could me, as a playwright, handle at one time.
Jo Reed: Yeah, because it gets very complicated.
Kirsten Greenidge: Yes.
Jo Reed: Plays take time to write, take time to develop, then they go into production. But the timing of Baltimore is pretty remarkable. Where were you in the writing process when the Black Lives Matter movement gained prominence?
Kirsten Greenidge: I was offered the commission in spring of 2014. I identify as African-American, and at that point, instances like Treyvon Martin and Eric Garner – to me, those happen, I wouldn’t say often, but I know of those happening. But the news media and their attention to them heightened with Treyvon Martin and points thereafter. I was offered the commission in 2014, and then in the summer of 2014 with Ferguson and things started really heating up. I kept emailing Alan, and we realized that as things heated up and I kept writing, it almost became a question of how much could the play hold? At one point, the play held a lot more references to everything that was going on. And because this is really <sighs> almost too much that my body can’t even handle it. As the names began to pile up and add, and I began to take them out, because it was almost too much to handle how many names were being added and how many incidents were being added. And I wanted the play to be able to keep being produced no matter many incidents kept happening, so I began to take them out. And I left in certain ones that are emblematic of that movement.
Jo Reed: I’d like to talk a little bit more about the development of Baltimore. How did it unfold? Did you workshop it?
Kirsten Greenidge: The first thing was a cast list, actually, and the cast list was a discussion between myself and the Big Ten consortium schools. And they just were interested who is going to be on stage, and that gave me some feedback. And that also gave me a little bit of information about who are in the theater departments of these Big Ten schools. And then in spring of 2015, I took, it was a full draft, went to Maryland, and we had a full day workshop with the University of Maryland students, there. And they gave me so much wonderful feedback. So that was the first big, robust workshop. And that was 10 hours of just sitting there, reading the script for the first time out loud, and having those students give me their very honest feedback about what they were feeling about it. And what was really raw and emotional about that is that was a week after the unrest in Baltimore. So that was University of Maryland about twenty minutes from Baltimore, I believe, talking about what they had been feeling on campus the week before. Then I spent the summer and kept writing and Elaine, who was the director here in BU – we decided we needed to do more workshops here in Boston. And we decided our workshops were going to allow as many students participate as possible. So what Maryland did is Maryland created a teacher class to go along with the production of Baltimore, so you had to be enrolled in that class which talked about race to be able to be part of that production. And what we did was we knew that a lot of our population who wanted to be part of this production weren’t going to be able to be in it. So we just got together. I think we did two or three workshops where we just had the script, and we said, “Whoever wants to show up can show up.” We had no idea. It could have been two people. I think we had 40 students for each. It was a lot of students. We were really surprised. And what we did was we would have someone read Shelby for 20 pages and then switch off. And then we had discussions about the piece and let them ask questions about the piece—not just content-wise but also structurally. And then I would take that feedback and rewrite. And all of the rewrites would go back to Alan. And he would then distribute them to the Big Ten schools so that they were up-to-date on how the script was moving along so that they could figure out how the play could fit into their production schedule.
Jo Reed: Race and class are often your subjects or your themes throughout your work. And I’ve noticed class is very rarely written about. People never seem to have to work, either on stage or in literature. But playwrights who do put class issues on stage typically are playwrights of color.
Kirsten Greenidge: Yeah. It’s one of the things I always ask in workshops, because I teach playwriting. What do people do all day? How do they get money? If we’re in a kitchen, what does the kitchen look like? If it’s in the living room, what does that coach look like? Are there holes in it? Who paid for?
Jo Reed: Seriously. Not everybody has a sub-zero fridge.
Kirsten Greenidge: Exactly. I think about it all of the time. I almost wonder how people can’t be writing about class and racism. It’s funny when people say, “Oh you write about race and class,” I think to myself, “Everybody writes about race and class,” because even if you have a play with all one race or white people on stage, you’re writing about race, because there’s just white people on the stage.
Jo Reed: You’re giving a particular perspective.
Kirsten Greenidge: You’re giving a perspective, and you’re writing about it, even if you’re not explicitly talking about it. To me, they’re linked. In Baltimore, one thing I think that has allowed Shelby to think that she’s been able to escape this discussion about race is that she lives a life where she has been privileged in some ways to be able to escape certain types of conversations. She talks about how her grandfather insulated himself from certain things in life by how he made all of his money. So I think race and class, in America, are often linked.
Jo Reed: There’s a play of yours, The Luck of the Irish, that tells a very compelling story about a little known piece of history, and I would really love for you to talk about the genesis of that play.
Kirsten Greenidge: That play began with the story of how my family bought their house in Arlington, Massachusetts. My mother always referred to it as ghost-buying. And that was when you would have a black buyer who wanted to buy a property use someone who could blend in more easily, usually that would mean a white buyer to buy that property. And the black buyer would put up the money, and the white buyer would be the face of the sale. And in Luck of the Irish, the black family puts up the family, and the white family is an Irish-American family. And 50 years later, the Irish family comes back and says, “Oh, the deed was always in our name. This is our house now,” or, “This has always been our house and you need to give it back,” says this to the grandchildren who are living in the house, which did not happen in our family. In our family, the family that helped us were family friends of ours, of my grandmother’s. It was a verbal agreement. And this was a long time ago and things kind of carried on from there. And that’s how my grandparents bought their house in Arlington, Massachusetts after having had some less than positive experiences trying to buy in that town in the early ‘50s and mid ‘50s.
Jo Reed: You were a playwright-in-residence in Washington DC’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre, which was part of a program created by the National Endowment for the Arts and Theater Communications Group, or TCG. Tell me about that experience. What did that residence allow you to do?
Kirsten Greenidge: It allowed me to write fulltime. And it allowed me to see how a theater works which was invaluable to me, because up until then, I had no idea how submission process worked. I mean I knew that I sent in my stuff, and it kind of went off into the mail system. I mean I would go to the post office every day and send off my scripts, and you’d never know what happens to them. But when I got there, Howard Shalwitz, who is the artist director there, invited us, two literary interns and myself, to be part of the selection process in terms of reading scripts because every theater gets tons and tons of scripts. So I got to sit in on those meetings and figure out how he goes through all of those scripts and how he reads them. And that was also invaluable to see how many scripts a theater gets each week and how many are in that pile was really, really, really invaluable to me. And how a theater operates and how much work is going on all of the time <laughs>. I don’t think I knew that before I sat in on those meetings.
Jo Reed: Do you have a particular process for writing? Or does it change from play to play?
Kirsten Greenidge: It can change from play to play. I tend to start a lot from historical research, whether or not those characters stay in the plays that I write. But I tend to read a lot and then bounce off of that reading and research into a play. And in my later plays, I tend to excise those historical figures out of the plays, but I usually tend to have to start from there. I eavesdrop a lot, so I take down a lot of people’s conversations and listen to them and then put those into scenes and start from there. I love the radio. I love listening to how people talk and cadence and rhythm. I listen to a lot of radio and get conversations from there. I tend to start from radio, voice, rhythms – stealing people’s conversations from there. My husband, when we go out to dinner and stuff is like, “You have to stop listening to people. Stop. Stop. Stop.” But it is – yeah, it can be hard to turn off. I love images and things like that but those tend to sometimes come a little later.
Jo Reed: What first drew you to theater?
Kirsten Greenidge: I think my family would say I’ve always been, what one might call, theatrical. And in my family, I don’t know if that is always a positive thing <laughs>. Dramatic. I would have plays on the floor of the living room with my sisters. And my neighbor and myself had a little theater company when I was little called Fantasy Theater. And we would charge money for our family members to come see us and sit in their own living room and come see our productions. And I’ve always written. So I got my first typewriter – my grandmother gave it to me when I was six years old. I’ve always considered myself a writer, and people have always affirmed that in me. When I was twelve I went to go see Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at BU’s Huntington Theatre, and that was life changing because after that, I thought, “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.” I had no idea how to do it. Back then, there weren’t a lot of playwriting programs. I think there’s a lot more now if you want to try to do that or if you even think you want to be a playwright. Theaters have more programs for young people. Schools bring in more playwrights and more teacher artists to do that, but back then that was not a thing at all, at least not in Boston. And so I didn’t take my first playwriting class until college, and I loved it. And it was a workshop style class. So I never took a class that told me what was right and wrong about playwriting, which I think is really important, because I think if I had had a class that was that didactic I would have been soured on playwriting.
Jo Reed: Like here’s the formula. Plug in.
Kirsten Greenidge: Here’s the formula. Here’s how you do it. And if you don’t do it this way, you’re a bad playwright. I think that would have crushed my spirit.
Jo Reed: Did you work with anyone, in particular, who had a big impact on your work?
Kirsten Greenidge: Yes, I took playwriting with a playwright named Darrah Cloud, and she was really wonderful. I took with her I think as many classes as I could.
Jo Reed: And this was at Wesleyan, correct?
Kirsten Greenidge: This was at Wesleyan, yeah. And she taught once a week. She lived in New York. She would come to Connecticut once a week and teach the class. And one thing that was really great – one semester she was pregnant, and she would come to class every week and then one week she just didn’t come, and we figured, “Oh, I guess she had her baby.” And we got together, and we wrote her a little card, and we sent it off. And the next week, we showed up for class; we figured we’d have a sub. And she showed up with her baby, and he was all swaddled up. And she put the baby next to her, and she taught class. And it was amazing to me, because I thought, “Wow, you can do this and have a family.” Now, I don't know how difficult it was for her to wrangle herself and her baby to get to Connecticut from New York, but that was really affirming to me, too, because not just myself, but many of us were trying to figure out is, “How can you be an artist and also have a life, a fulfilling life?” And her husband was an actor, too. So she would also give us some great life advice about how to do this, and that it was possible—that you didn’t have to live in a shack on the side of the road <laughter> eating crusts of bread by yourself just for your art.
Jo Reed: Let me just backtrack for a second because you say it was your teacher coming back with her baby gave you a sense that it’s possible to have a life and be a playwright. But you’re also a fulltime teacher, as well as a playwright, as well as a mother, as well as a wife. That’s hard.
Kirsten Greenidge: Yes. I can’t lie. It is. <laughs>
Jo Reed: How do you manage?
Kirsten Greenidge: I have no idea <laughs>. I mean right now I’m – as we speak, both shows in Boston have closed. And as we drove to school, today both my kids are like, “Are you picking us up from school? Are you picking us up from dance? Are you having dinner with us? Are you putting us to bed?” When I hear those questions peppered at me, I’m like, “Oh right. I have been gone a lot in the last two months.” So it is difficult, and I don’t think there’s a balance, necessarily. It’s knowing that there’s going to be months or weeks where I’m not around as much, and I happen to have a really great support system, here, in my mom and my sister. I don't know how I would do this without a support system that knows my children really well, that cares about my children really well. To be quite honest, that we’re not paying an arm and a leg – I mean I don’t think we could afford the type of childcare that was needed to get through the last two months, to be quite honest. That is a huge thing, I think, for working moms everywhere but particularly, for theater artists in terms of having children, because you’re not asking for someone to watch your kids during normal hours. The hours that you’re working are crazy, strange hours. I remember listening in on an online conversation with new parents in theater, and they were saying, “Maybe we could get like a nanny-share, and a theater could have daycare in the theater.” And it’s like – we’re talking homework and putting kids to bed once your kids get old enough. There’s just no way I could do this without having the type of care I have structured in the way my husband and I have been able to structure it in.
Jo Reed: Do you find you have to be very disciplined in order to write, or can you snatch moments here and there and put it together?
Kirsten Greenidge: It’s highly structured. So one way how I do it is that having the university job allows me to plan out when I write so I write. So I write in the summers. That’s when I generate works. So last year – I wrote six plays last year, and I wrote them during breaks and vacations from school. And then I – usually what I do, also, is I take Mondays, and I write during Mondays, and that’s when I get drafts done. So how I get the writing work done is highly, highly, highly structure and highly planned. And then when I’m teaching, I’m full-on teaching, and I have to give myself permission to not beat myself up that I’m not writing or that I’m not doing something else.
Jo Reed: It’s being where you are when you’re there.
Kirsten Greenidge: Yeah.
Jo Reed: You know, there is so much conversation about diversity in theater. There has been convenings, and it’s a conversation that's been going on for quite some time. And I’m wondering what you’ve seen change on the ground, and what you think still needs to be done.
Kirsten Greenidge: I’ve seen attention to it change. So I’ve seen an awareness change. It feels like the numbers are changing—just the numbers of productions, plays by people who are considered “other.” It feels like it’s changing, and then sometimes I do see the numbers or I see the lists of what’s about to be produced next year starting to come out. So on the ground, it can feel like it’s changing, and then you get the numbers and you’re like, “Oh, wow. It didn’t seem to be changing so much. I’m not sure what’s happening.” But the awareness does seem to be changing. And that seems to be a good thing. And so when the numbers do come out, and you still see those numbers of like oh still only 27 percent are by women – female playwrights, or only 11 percent are by playwrights who are black. And you see those numbers – that can be really disparaging. So, obviously, there’s still work to be done, room to grow.
Jo Reed: I know there’s no simple answer but I wonder what you think can move the issue of diversity in the theater from a topic of conversation to an actuality?
Kirsten Greenidge: I don’t think those things are going to change until the powers that be, themselves, change. And I think a lot of times, audience has a lot more voice than it thinks it does. So when audience says, “We want to see this type of play or these plays,” theaters will often listen because theaters want to respond to audience, in a way. I mean that’s why you got A Christmas Carol which, by the way when I see a theater have A Christmas Carol, I actually get really excited because I’m like, “People seem to like A Christmas Carol and they are responding to people saying they want to see A Christmas Carol.” I think there are other plays that other audiences will also want to see. So it’s not only the job of large theaters and artistic directors; everyone has a job to do in creating more diverse theater. It’s interesting. I think sometimes there will be demand for it, and then theaters will say, “Okay, we’ve chosen like these three plays to do,” and then the audience doesn’t show up. So everyone has a job to do.
Jo Reed: Baltimore has an open ending which makes one think that you really are hoping conversations will be generated by this play.
Kirsten Greenidge: I am. The ending is <laughs> a little terrifying. So here at BU, we did a talk-back after every performance. And I participated in three of the talk-backs, which was great, but it was also frightening because you come in after them and one worry I had was that people would be so dissatisfied with the ending that they would demand an ending from me as I sat there. And I only felt that a couple of times. In some drafts, I did have more of an ending or a definite ending, and I thought, “If I had an answer to this country’s race problem, that would be just lovely. But I don’t.” And so I felt it felt disingenuous to have a different type of ending for this play. And one thing that’s really wonderful about the Big Ten commission is that when you have these plays, you have all of these resources on these universities’ campuses to be able to foster conversations about these plays that deal with some very complex issues. And you have all of these populations on these universities that can offer up diverse points of view and after the play is over, you have an opportunity to invite more discussion. And so that’s what I’m hoping the play is able to do.
Jo Reed: I really felt like, “Ah, she’s saying it’s in our hands.”
Kirsten Greenidge: Yes.
Jo Reed: Kirsten Greenidge, thank you very much.
Kirsten Greenidge: You’re welcome. Thanks for seeing it.
Jo Reed: My pleasure. Thank you.
That’s Kirsten Greenidge. Her new play Baltimore is running at the University of Maryland’s Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts until March 5th. You've been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.
In her new work Baltimore, playwright Kirsten Greenidge grapples with the issue of race on college campuses.