Interview: Playwright Kirsten Greenidge talks MORNING, NOON, AND NIGHT and more

Playwright Kirsten Greenidge wants to make one thing clear about her new play, “Morning, Noon, and Night.”

“I would like people to know that while it is about life post-pandemic, it’s definitely a comedy,” explained Greenidge recently by telephone from her office at BU. “I told Shawn La Count (co-founder, and artistic and co-executive director, of Boston’s Company One Theatre) that I didn’t want to write a Covid play and I didn’t want to write a play to be done on Zoom and he agreed.”

The new play – being given its world premiere by C1 in a co-production with Boston University’s College of Fine Arts at the Plaza Theatre, Boston Center for the Arts, through May 25 – follows a mother and daughter, Mia and Dailyn, as they struggle to feel seen and supported by each other. Their fraught, funny relationship is put under the microscope when an AI social-media influencer created by Dailyn springs to life and begins taking matters into her own hands.

“I’ve been exploring what we can learn from the past few years,” says Greenidge. “In deep pandemic times, the great stretch of time spent at home caused me to reconnect with people I had not seen or heard from in a very long time. I’ve come to realize that while some of these unions are worth keeping around, others were better left untouched.”

The idea for her new play began during a conversation in the Westborough home she shares with her husband, her two teenaged children, her sister Kerri, and her mother, Ariel D. Greenidge.

“The seventh grader said, ‘Why do I have to do homework when the world probably won’t be around much longer because your generation messed it up with things like climate change?’” explains Greenidge. “That got me thinking. My kids get mad, though, when I put them in my plays, so I tried very hard to make sure that Mia and Dailyn became their own unique characters, not based on anyone else.”

For her AI research, Greenidge turned to a popular social-media platform.

“I got obsessed with TikTok, mostly because of the recipes. Now, my sisters will say that I often come up with recipes that don’t appeal to others, which is a reference to what in our family is called ‘The Madcap Cantaloupe Soup Caper of 1988,’ when I tried a new recipe for my birthday. That was a long time ago and I think I’m good now, but my mother is great in the kitchen so she’s tough competition,” says the playwright with a laugh.

Other AI-related inspirations came from TV programs and movies Greenidge enjoyed in childhood.

“There was an afterschool special called ‘The Electric Grandmother,’ which featured a computer grandmother, that Kerri and I both loved,” recalls Greenidge. “There was also ‘Small Wonder,’ a 1980s science fiction sitcom about the family of a robotics engineer who creates a robot modeled on a human girl, then tries to pass her off as an adopted member of the family.”

For Greenidge, “Morning, Noon, and Night,” her second play written as Mellon Foundation Playwright-in-Residence at C1, gave her the opportunity to collaborate with longtime colleagues and friends Ilana M. Brownstein and Summer L. Williams, C1’s co-founder and associate artistic director, who serve as its dramaturg and director, respectively.

“Ilana and I have had a long working relationship and the three of us worked together when we were all on staff at C1, but with this play, I’m finally getting to really work with Summer,” says Greenidge. “She directed a workshop of it at Tufts, in connection with their theater department, in 2023, and she is my director and collaborator now.”

Being surrounded by creative, talented women is nothing new to Greenidge. Her sister Kaitlyn Greenidge, an editor at Harper’s Bazaar, has published two novels, 2016’s “We Love You, Charlie Freeman” and 2021’s “Libertie: A Novel.” Her other sister, Kerri K. Greenidge, is Mellon Associate Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University – where she also co-directs the African American Trail Project and Tufts’ Slavery, Colonialism, and Their Legacies Project – and author of 2019’s “Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter” and 2023’s “The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family.”

Greenidge herself attended Cambridge Friends School, graduated from Arlington High School, studied U.S. History at Wesleyan University, and did her graduate work at the University of Iowa. A onetime Huntington Playwriting Fellow, Greenidge has won Obie, PEN/America Laura Pels, and Sundance Time Warner awards for her plays, which include “Splendor,” “Bossa Nova,” and “The Gibson Girl.” She is now director of the School of Theatre at Boston University. Her plays “The Luck of the Irish,” “Milk Like Sugar,” “Common Ground Revisited,” and “Our Daughters, Like Pillars,” were presented by the Huntington.

And while she does take on Covid-19’s impact through a family prism, while blending in themes of mental health, housing instability, and social media’s omnipresence, Greenidge sets out to do so with hope, optimism, and humor.

“As Charlie Chaplin once said,” points out Greenidge. “‘Anyone can make them cry, but it takes a genius to make them laugh.’”

Photo caption: Kalli Y. Turner, Alexandria King, Eliza Fitchter, and Sydney Jackson in a scene from the Company One Theatre and Boston University College of Fine of Arts co-production of “Morning, Noon, and Night” by Kirsten Greenidge. Photo by Annielly Camargo. Headshot of Kirsten Greenidge courtesy of C1.

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