Baltimore

(6W, 3M) When a racially-charged incident divides her first-year students, reluctant resident advisor Shelby finds herself in the middle of a conversation she does not want to have. As pressure to address the controversy mounts from residents, the new dean, and even her best friend, Shelby must decide if she will enter the fray or watch her community come apart at the seams. Sharp, funny, and searing, Baltimore is a timely drama about racism on college campuses.

Milk Like Sugar

(2M 5W) 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.

Bossa Nova

(1M 6W) With spellbinding theatricality Kirsten takes us into the life of a young African-American woman. While Dee attempts to avoid the manicured lawns of her family’s upper middle class existence, she is continually confronted with characters eager to help shape her life. Powerful and poetic, Bossa Nova bursts with humor as it asks serious questions about the search for identity in a world filled with contradictions.

The Gibson Girl

(3M 6W) From the recesses of the girls bathroom comes a voice: utterly unruly and viciously vivacious. Its owner is twelve-year-old Valerie, whose life would be a thousand times more endurable if her twin sister would quit her daughter-knows-best act and her mother would abandon her peculiar rituals that she hopes will lure the girls’ long absent father home with syrup tapped from trees in the family’s front yard. But the forces that stifle Valerie’s spirit are facing extinction and strange alliances threaten to unearth a deep secret that, if exposed, will reverse the girls’ fortunes forever.

The Luck of the Irish

(3M 4W) When Hannah and her sister Nissa invite a long time friend of the family’s to a memorial picnic for their grandmother, they learn that the deed to the house their family has called home for decades is being mysteriously “reclaimed.” The news forces Hannah into a tailspin as she wrestles with her relationship with the town she’s called home. Interlaced with Hannah’s struggles are glimpses of the past when the deal that procured their home came to fruition.

Splendor

(4M 6W) On Thanksgiving eve in a town just north of Boston, Fran is determined to make a nice turkey dinner for her chain-smoking klepto mother, and her couch-surfing older brother. If only it were that simple. A vivid collage of local stories exposes a community where generations of families collide over far more than pumpkin pie and stuffing.

Zenith

(2M 4W) It seems that hardly a day goes by that the media doesn’t confront us with yet another unspeakable act. Kirsten Greenidge’s Zenith teases out the complex and interwoven threads of one life that ends shockingly. Daring in structure and rich in detail, this play makes us question whether we can ever truly fathom another human being. A Denver Center Commission.

Our Daughters, Like Pillars

(2M 5W) Determined to have a perfect vacation with her sisters, Lavinia has dropped off her kids at camp and rented a summer house. Her siblings, however, bring along their own baggage that threatens to ruin Lavinia’s meticulously planned week. And when their long-estranged stepmother shows up out of the blue, dormant tensions boil to the surface, forcing the women to face their cherished notions of family and how far they will go to preserve those beliefs.

COMMONGROUND: REVISTED

(Flexible Ensemble) Conceived by Kirsten and director Melia Bensussen, this exploration of J. Anthony Lukas’ pulitzer-prize winning book COMMON GROND: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families.

The Greater Good

(3M 6W 1 non binary) This play is meant to probe into the progressive impulse to effect change in the world through progressive education. In the mid to latter half of the last century, this often meant independent education, where, particularly in the Northeast—Harvard’s Backyard, so to speak—private schools were a means to practice pedagogical theory. But what happens when the impulse to do good remains but the world that surrounds it shifts irrevocably?

Beacon

(2M 7W) Excecutive chef and culinary visionary Virginia Halloway has finally opened her dream restaurant in her dream location— the very neighborhood where she and childhood friend Shannon overcame hardship years ago. But not everyone is pleased by Virginia’s good fortune, and the eatery’s presence, once a symbol of local-girl-makes-good now promises something that is anything but.

Little Row Boat; or, Conjecture

(4M, 3W) When sixteen year old Sally crosses the sea to accompany her charge and, coincidentally, her niece, Polly, she realizes the venture for what it could be— the chance to explore the world outside of the plantation that might otherwise have been her only home. When she finds herself to be the object of fascination for Polly’s father once the girls arrive in Paris, Sally begins to question her roles even more in a landscape that ordinarily wouldn’t expect Sally’s voice to rise ever at all.