Milk Like Sugar is the disquieting story of three young women, high school students who decide, when one announces she’s pregnant, they should all have babies together. “You can dress them up, and they’ll love you,” explains one. Also, people have to buy you what you want, like Coach diaper bags and tiny Air Jordans.
Yes, they are very young – we meet them in a tattoo parlor as Annie (Brandi Threatts) is about to turn 16 – so young that one of their ways of assessing a potential father is what kind of cell phones he has. (The play is set about 15 years ago, more or less when a similar pact was discovered among young women at a Massachusetts school.) Margie (Camille Sharp) is the one who’s pregnant. The high-energy queen bee Talisha (Tyler White) has an older boyfriend who actually has his own place. Birthday girl Annie will be the one auditioning potential baby daddies.
Annie’s clearly the only one even vaguely pondering other alternatives in her life, but she has no idea what. She sort of feels a spark with the tattoo artist (Brian McKinley). A senior, Malik (Dwayne McCowan), who’s heard she thinks he’s cute, wants to meet her in a park. Both of the young men talk, in different ways, about things they’re passionate about, encouraging her. Keera (Jillian Franks), a girl at school that Talisha has bullied into writing a paper for her and whom the girls disdainfully refer to as Holly Hobbie, the rustic cartoon/toy character, talks about how her loving father and her religion have given her happiness, but Annie has neither of those to identify with.
It’s really not until Annie is talking to her mom (Michelle Dillard) that we get a full sense of how much she wants something and how tough it’s going to be for her to get there. Mom cleans offices at night and writes stories in the daytime. Pregnant as a teenager, raising three children alone, she’s tired and angry. Now she hears her only daughter dreamily explain that “Babies aren’t real work.” More than reality rears its ugly head.
This is indeed real life. It’s not cute, it’s not contrived. It’s hard, it’s frustrating and it’s a problem that art can’t solve.
The young women actors are a delight. Threatts carries off the not-always-easy appearance of adolescent subtlety just as well as she does the excitement of the birthday. As Margie, Sharp is convinced she knows pretty much everything she needs to know, and her disdain when a nurse wearing a glove tries to hand her prenatal information is beyond scathing. Then there’s White’s Talisha, who is totally supercharged except when she’s talking about her boyfriend; then, somehow, she becomes distant. The off-key Keera from Franks is a wonderful puzzlement, so different that it’s hard to take one’s eyes off her.
Still, it’s mom that leads the way. Michelle Dillard pretty much owns that role, mopping up the floor with her daughter. Malik, the boy with an idea of the outside world, is hesitant and interested at the same time in Dwayne McCowan’s hands; Brian McKinley’s young tattoist opens up at last and lets us see the self-assurance isn’t all it seems.
Nicole Brewer directed, pulling it all together with verve. The fascinating scenic design is by Rama, the lights from Sean Savoie, and the interesting sound from Kareem Deanes. As to the script – I’ve heard the argument that the opening is too Over The Top. I’ve heard that the ending is too weak. Both are wrong. The opening is accurate, however grating adolescent women can be, and the exposition is spot-on. The ending…this isn’t an after-school special, to be sure. But in between, there’s a strong story about real life and some fascinating character development, and that’s the best of all.
No intermission, and it’s working in the black box at the Edison Theatre in Washington University’s Mallinkrodt Center – at the west end of the building.
Milk Like Sugar
through March 3
The Black Rep
A. E. Hotchner Studio Theatre
Washington University in St. Louis