Growing up in Reading, focus on the future is an intrinsic part of our upbringing. From an early age, thoughts of the jobs we want to pursue one day, the colleges we want to attend, and striving for excellence to achieve these goals, consume our minds. Introduction to making dreams a reality are given time and time again, even as elementary school students. “What do you want to be when you grow up?,” a question constantly posed and reiterated throughout every stage of learning, and growing up.
In a town where the high school graduation rate is almost 94%, college education and a job consecutively following are almost always granted. I, for one, have never given that path and plan of action a second thought.
However, most kids are not so lucky. Outside of Reading and similar suburban towns, there is great poverty, and where there is great poverty, there is great loss of potential. Kids are not able to envision a future for themselves outside of the streets, and the cycle of poverty continues.
This jarring reality is expanded upon and brought to life in Milk Like Sugar, an Obie award-winning play by Kirsten Greenidge, which I recently saw at the South End’s Huntington Theater.
Greenidge drew upon her own experiences growing up to write this play, explaining in July of 2011, “Several of my plays have to do with sordid happenings with young girls, and I think it might have to do with my own ruminations about this tension between being a very good girl and then knowing there are girls out there who don't know any better and don't know enough to help themselves to better, even when better might be within reach.”
Milk Like Sugar follows high school sophomore Annie and her friends, Margie and Talisha, as they navigate the pressures of growing up in the inner city. But, this story is a staunchly different high school experience, with starkly different stresses than the one that we write every day at RMHS.
Loosely inspired by the “pregnancy pact” in Gloucester in 2008 and the reality of socioeconomically affected opportunity, Milk Like Sugar portrays the girls’ promise to each other that they will all get pregnant, in an effort to reap the material benefits of a baby shower, and have a person in their life who will always love them.
Annie plans to carry out her promise with senior Malik, but is stopped in her tracks when he turns out to be an outlier, both future and college-focused. The first time they meet, Malik brings a telescope with him, a key symbol in trying to show Annie all that the world has to offer, and how big it truly is. Malik ends up being her wake up call, as she realizes there is more in the world than the life she has been living, and re-analyzes the deal that she made. Along the way, Annie also meets Keera, a studious girl who is new to their school, who introduces her to God, another inspiration to look outside of her current situation.
As an audience member, you become attached to the girls, no matter what their decisions may be. You feel a sense of empathy for them, whether you are a fellow teenager or you were one long ago, because their decisions are not a product of their character, but of the society that they had to grow up in.
For audience members who grow up in a very different environment, it is only natural to latch onto the idealistic light at the end of the tunnel that Keera and Malik provide Annie with. The subconscious assumption is made that Annie will put the pains of her past and present behind her, and focus on what could be for her, and all that she is capable of. Conditioned to believe that everyone can achieve the American dream, simply because it has been placed in our laps, we are under the false impression that opportunity does not determine a life.
These uneducated hopes are dashed as the quiet reality of poverty sets in, and Annie follows the path that she has been on all along. As the most central figures in her life tell her that she can’t, her mother, Myrna, saying she is worthless, and Margie and Talisha writing her off as disloyal and untrustworthy, she falls back into the same trap she began in.
The play ends in a meeting between Annie and Malik before he goes off to college, where they sit looking up at the same stars that they did upon their first meeting, but all is different now. Annie is pregnant after a fleeting moment of feeling special and worthy with Antwoine, a tattoo artist’s, baby. Myrna, a teenage mother herself, will no longer speak to Annie.
The play’s journey and ending serves just the right amount of reality to shock and sadden viewers with the truth that ensues outside of suburbia, but gives an ounce of hope to hold onto, as the play ends with a pregnant Annie smilingly admiring the vast universe around her. She looks through Malik’s telescope, now pregnant, representing what could be, but what actually is.
Milk Like Sugar evokes from its audience the same feelings that its characters experience, wish and expectation, that is then erased by actuality.
This play is a paramount example of what Reading and towns similar must learn, as it is ever so easy to believe that this way of life is all that there is. The show demands attention because it contrasts our everyday so severely, but out of that contrast also comes parallels; we all search for a reason to feel special, we all struggle with the fear of the unknown, we all grapple with seeing outside of what we have grown up with, and we all live, breathe, and sleep underneath those same stars. But, some of us are given that telescope to tangibly see the stars with, while others can see them from afar but never be able to reach them.
