Milk Like Sugar

Characters: 2 male, 5 female

Winner! of a 2011 Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award
Winner! of The San Diego Critics Circle 2011 Craig Noel Award for Outstanding New Play

It is Annie Desmond's sixteenth birthday and her friends have decided to help her celebrate in style, complete with a brand new tattoo. Before her special night is over, however, Annie and her friends enter into a life altering pact. When Annie tries to make good on her promise to her friends, she is forced to take a good look at the world that surrounds her. She befriends Malik, who promises a bright future, and Keera, whose evangelical leanings inspire Annie in a way her young parents have not been able to do. In the end Annie's choices propel her onto an irreversible path in this story that combines wit, poetry, and hope.

"A distinctive view of a matter of vital currency, crisply delineated characters who reveal more layers as the play proceeds, richly funny vernacular dialogue... Milk Like Sugar delivers piercing glimpses of the way underachievement and unhappiness are passed down from generation to generation." - The New York Times

"Milk Like Sugar's remarkable features include its locale, an urban, African-American subworld that displays, for once, neither the brutalizing clich s of a poverty-stricken ghetto nor the discomfiting artificiality of a talented-tenth safe haven. Instead, Greenidge populates her story with a sampling of the innumerable young people between those extremes." - The Village Voice

"Greenidge's crackling, often humorous dialogue is in the vernacular of inner-city residents who deliberately distort language...Metaphors about flames, burning and flying are nicely woven throughout the story, along with lyrical symbolic imagery." - The Associated Press

"Kirsten Greenidge's fast-talking, victim-taking New York debut" - Entertainment Weekly

"Greenidge captures girl speak in unnerving perfection" - The Daily News

"The title refers to the sweet powdered milk that offers far more flavor than nutritional value. But the tart Milk Like Sugar offers plenty of both" - The New York Post