Thomas Breen photo
West, Sellem, and Castro in Milk Like Sugar.
A red lollipop dangling between her fingers like a cigarette, her braids perched like a crown above her leopard-print dress, one teenage girl took a long, searing look at another.
“If you back out now, life’s gonna get very lonely,” threatened Talisha, staring down her high-school classmate and lifelong friend Annie.
“You’re gonna do this. It’s called friendship. Look it up: It’s called loyalty.”
As the pop music swelled and the lights began to fade, director Jenny Nelson called for her team to stop.
“Can we do that one more time?” she said. “But this time I’d like the music to drop in right between ‘friendship’ and ‘look.’ And let’s hold that pose all the way until the lights fade. Thank you!”
Actors Sharece Sellem and Malia West paused before returning to character.
“Wow,” Sellem leaned toward West. “‘It’s called friendship. It’s called loyalty.’ That just sounds so good!”
Such was the scene at Erector Square in Fair Haven on Monday night as the team behind Collective Consciousness Theater ran through their first full rehearsal of Kirsten Greenidge’s Milk Like Sugar, the next and last play in the local theater’s 2016 – 17 season.
The play opens Thursday night and runs through April 9 at Collective Consciousness Theater’s studio performance space in Erector Square.
Tamika Pettway-Brown and West.
Greenidge’s Obie-award winning play tells the story of three high school friends who have made a pact to get pregnant before they graduate. Unable to see a future beyond negligent parents, fairweather teachers, and dismal job prospects, Annie, Talisha, and Marjorie (Betzabeth Castro) idealize pregnancy as the natural, and inevitable, solution to all of life’s problems.
Here is an action that gives life purpose. Here is a way to be in control of one’s body. Here is a commitment that will forever ensure against loneliness and uncertainty.
“We’ll be like Beyonce,” they smile at one another. “We’ll be like lions, surrounded by our little cubbies.”
The play then follows Annie as she explores what she can and should expect from her life, and how her relationships with her mom and her girlfriends and a potential child can limit or expand that path.
This drama of a socioeconomic divide playing out in high school hallways is exactly what director Jenny Nelson wanted to bring to the stage with Milk Like Sugar.
“This play is really about choices, and about a lack of choices,” said Nelson, who is the associate director of Collective Consciousness Theater and a high school theater teacher at Regional Center for the Arts in Trumbull, Ct. “Although the pregnancy pact is the inciting incident of the play, the playwright really wants us to focus on the limited options available to these girls.”
Those limited options refer to a lack of access to money, education, attention, and guidance. They also mean an incomplete grasp on words themselves. The teenagers struggle with how best to communicate the ideas and feelings bursting inside of them, and their language of fragments and fumbling articulations is only exacerbated by the constant interruptions of cellphones.
As the actors worked their way through the dialect of the script, stopping and starting and repeating the lines with the intense vulnerability that defines teenage life, Nelson relished the language as both artfully written and accurately reflecting what she hears at work.
“The voices ring so true to what I hear all the time in the halls from my male and female students,” she said. “It just felt very authentic and very earnest in telling a story that isn’t being told enough on the stage right now.”
“We’re treating it a little like Shakespeare,” she continued, “with the verse and the musicality and the rhythms of the way they speak.”
West, Sellem, and Castro.
Over the course of the play, Annie, Talisha, and Marjorie lunge, parry, dodge, and embrace one another with all the passion of Romeo and Juliet, the hysteria of Hamlet and Ophelia. In front of set designer David Sepulveda’s vivid backdrops of candy-colored tattoo parlors and iridescent starry nights, the high schoolers’ desperate yearnings for purpose manage to embody a specific present and an eternal adolescence all at the same time.
“These girls feel like getting pregnant is the only way they can get out of their limited situation and receive love,” Nelson said. “Which at the end of the day is what every play is about: giving and receiving love.”
For Annie, Talisha, and Marjorie, and for Collective Consciousness Theater as a whole, the conditions under which love is given and received in Milk Like Sugar can mean the difference between friends and family, between youth and adulthood, between being stuck and being free.
Milk Like Sugar runs at Collective Consciousness Theater in Erector Square, 315 Peck St. (Studio D, Building 6 West, 2nd floor) from Thursday, March 30 to Sunday, April 2, and from Thursday, April 6 to Sunday, April 9. Tickets are $25 for adults, $10 for students. Click here to buy tickets in advance.
