Kirsten Greenidge’s Our Daughters, Like Pillars, premiering at the Huntington Theatre Company, is a damaged-family play in which the eldest of three daughters thinks she possesses the repair formula.
An academically oriented bunch out of Cambridge, MA, the Shaws have endured much fragmentation in the 30 years since the patriarch, famous scholar Lemuel Shaw, abandoned his wife Yvonne (Lizan Mitchell) and kids to marry Missy (Cheryl D. Singleton), a campus cafeteria worker. Middle daughter Octavia (Arie Thompson) is a blocked author estranged from her husband, while Zelda (Lyndsay Allyn Cox) is a free spirit with few visible means of support.
The old man is now dead, prompting no-nonsense Lavinia (Nikkole Salter) to invite everyone to a healing vacation week in a woodsy New Hampshire cabin. (Marion Williams’ set is a nice mixture of bucolic beauty and clutter.) Vinnie’s barely-disguised aim is to convince the others that nothing will do but to purchase a large home—perhaps this very one—and all move in together, forever. But unearthed secrets and unexpected guests, notably the long-resented and reviled Widow Shaw herself, render further family cohabitation an unlikely prospect indeed.
Greenidge is best known for Milk Like Sugar, a searing 2011 drama inspired by the pervasive “babies-having-babies” phenomenon, which had a triumphant debut at La Jolla Playhouse and, transferred east, picked up that year’s Obie Award for Playwrighting. She has written of the demand for “the 90-minute play, where you experience a plethora of emotions within an hour and a half,” and this new work breaks through that barrier much as Tracy Letts did, when his Pulitzer honoree August: Osage County pushed beyond the relative minimalism of Killer Joe and Bug.
Parallels between Daughters and August only begin with similar running times of 3½ hours with two intermissions. Both feature a remote mansion; a heavy-smoking, dotty matriarch shuffling around in a wrapper; three daughters (one bossy, one stuck, one wacky); an absent father; surprise attendees; and plenty of darkness lurking in the corners. Our Daughters, it should be noted, eschews the symbolic overtones that some feel layer too much pretentiousness into Letts’ play.
The biggest difference between August in Osage, OK and July in North Conway, NH is that Letts’ rapacious characters revel in the opportunity to battle and belittle each other, while airing all their grievances at full volume. By contrast the Shaws are ever decorous, always simmering while falling short of boiling over. Audiences used to family dramas on stage, film, and TV may find themselves anticipating fireworks that never quite get set off.
It’s pretty clear early on that Greenidge, and director Kimberly Senior (who helmed another Pulitzer winner on Broadway, Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced), have no intention of letting the action drift into anything like melodrama. The first two acts feature a lot of squabbling over minor issues like a traditional lemonade recipe, or whether anyone is allowed to pick up ringing phones. But direct assaults, such as they are, begin only with the arrival of Missy, and even when she brazenly insists on being treated as a legit part of the family, the others are more likely to swallow their annoyance than voice it. Two men are allowed into the circle, Lavinia’s affable husband Morris (Postell Pringle) and Zelda’s just-picked-up “partner” Paul (Julian Parker), but each is too easygoing or ineffectual to stir things up.
You might hope that older brother Birdie would pop in, the wealthy attorney who alerted the second Mrs. Shaw to the reunion; ditto Octavia’s argumentative, high-octane husband Tim (“He has ideas,” she notes). But the livelier family members are omitted from the cast of characters, the better (I suspect) to ratchet up the tension among the Shaw women. That tactic succeeds—their anxieties and frustrations build and build—but it sure does put a cap on the excitement level in the course of 3½ hours, at least 30 minutes of which could easily be trimmed if the cast picked up their cues consistently.
Our Daughters, Like Pillars has something important and original to say about the unwarranted optimism that motivates so many efforts to do good in the world, and the unintended consequences when outcomes fall short. Further tightening should bring its themes into sharper focus, but even now, the play is impressive and worth a theatergoer’s attention (the production will be digitally available through most of May). All of the performances are strong and focused, and Singleton’s is particularly so. Her light Caribbean accent, wry sense of humor, and Missy’s insistence on uncomfortable truth-telling consistently promise fun along with all the seething, not-to-be-directly-expressed conflict. And often as not, Singleton delivers.
Our Daughters, Like Pillars opened April 20, 2022 , at the Huntington Theatre Company (Boston) and runs through May 8. A digital recording will be available to stream through May 22. Tickets and information: huntingtontheatre.org
