Poetic License: A Review of Milk Like Sugar

Milk Like Sugar is a well-written, solid play, if a bit heavy handed, about an

African-American girl, Annie, struggling to get out of her toxic world and into another

one. There has been much written and marketed that the play is, as Charles Isherwood

put it in his New York Times review, “about teenage motherhood.” I would strongly beg

to differ. Though teenage motherhood is, indeed, a major plot point and the lynchpin of

the play, I saw the play revolving around Annie’s struggle to deal with her surroundings.

Part of her surroundings, admittedly, is a pregnancy pact she enters into with her

girlfriends, but she also deals with a bitter mother, her friend’s abusive relationship,

economic hardship, and a seemingly enlightened Christian classmate who in fact is a

compulsive liar. The girls see their pregnancy pact as a way to ameliorate their lives and

therefore their surroundings, but it in fact ends up trapping them into the world they so

desperately want to change. The plot of the play was strong and compelling, but the way

in which Kristen Greenridge went about it was a bit overwritten.

When Malik and Annie go on their "date" on a rooftop, they discuss they sky and

the passing planes, and their dreams of going somewhere and one day being one of those

people on the planes. This motif of planes, flying, and the sky reoccurred several times

and seemed obvious and writerly and a little bit unbelievable. Would two kids from a

hard-knock area really be monologuing so poetically about the sky? And would they do

it so repeatedly?

The characters were fleshed-out and well-written, and all the performances were

quite committed and beautiful. Standouts were Adrienne C. Moore as Keera, whose

work was gorgeous, and Cherise Boothe as T, who was heartbreaking. Tonya Pinkins as

Myrna, Annie's mother, was a revelation. Her unfiltered acidity was refreshing in a play

filled with so much talk of flying and moving in the world.

It was a bit of a stretch for me to accept the three central actresses as sixteen years

old. They were all three wonderful, made bold choices, and had stunning and hilarious

dialect work. But the sense of danger of a sixteen year old coming into her sexuality was

lacking because the three women were clearly older. The threat of one of them becoming

pregnant did not seem particularly wrong for their age range, whereas the idea of a

pregnant sixteen-year-old does, and this casting weakened the play. For example, when

Annie has sex with Antwoine near the end of the play, it is an act of statutory rape. At

the very least, it should feel illicit. They explicitly say to each other that they are doing

something wrong.

The work that the actors were doing spoke volumes to the direction, which I

thought was sensitive and well-handled. The transitions between scenes of the play were

for the most part very helpful in maintaining a momentum and a story continuum and

even at times foreshadowing what was to come. Beyonce's "Run the World" played

almost constantly during these transitions, alternating with the sounds of planes

overhead. By that point, I was tired of the plane business but appreciated the attempt.

As I sat down to watch, my set designer friend beside me remarked that there

must be a major scene change coming because of the large wall in the center of the stage.

“It must be concealing something,” he said. Unfortunately, he was wrong. The wall was

a large, moveable set piece that lit up in neon bars, moving upstage and downstage

between scenes and delineating the playing space, or how much room the characters had

to breathe in. Finally, at the end of the play, it came to rest just a few feet away from the

downstage edge of the stage, symbolizing how trapped Annie was in her situation. This

was an effective but perhaps too literal metaphor for the play, especially as it concurred

with the dredging out of the airplane dialogue for the final time.


The costumes served the play so well. They were funny, bright, and realistic,

with Margie dressed constantly in a sweatsuit that matched her phone that matched her

shoes that matched her bag, and T in revealing tough-girl wear, and Annie in jeans and

changing jackets. A particularly beautiful costume moment was when Myrna takes off

her wig after coming home from being fired. It spoke worlds to the situation she was in

and told the story without any excess or frivolity, something that both the set and the

sound design could take more cues from.