Kirsten Greenidge: CFS Alum, Parent, Trustee, Award Winning Playwright

For their spring production, eighth-graders at Cambridge Friends School will perform an adaptation of Baltimore by Kirsten Greenidge, Alumna ’88, Parent ’21 and ’23. It is quite extraordinary for an elementary school drama program to get a specially adapted play by an Obie Award-winning playwright. Boston native Kirsten Greenidge (Luck of the Irish, Milk Like Sugar, and Our Daughters, Like Pillars), opted to pay it forward to her alma mater, Cambridge Friends School, and adapted her 2015 play, Baltimore, for the eighth-grade drama program.

The original play, Baltimore, was a Big Ten commission to address the problem of gender parity in BFA programs in the US from the University of Iowa. Baltimore is about a college Resident Advisor who encounters a racial incident in her dorm and is neither able to deal with it nor have the language to properly address it and the aftermath. Originally intended to be a conversation about race at the college level, Kirsten adapted the play to retain the same dialogue, but made it age-appropriate for middle-school students.

At the beginning of the school year, Kirsten met with the eighth-grade drama class, and then published dialogue surrounding their conversation. Characters were created for each student that explored an alternative, culturally diverse personality. Reflecting on the play, Kirsten states, “I think it’s wonderful that we have the opportunities to have eighth-graders learn those [drama and empathy] skills in fifth grade, have them develop in sixth and seventh grade, get to exercise them at this level in eighth grade, and then see it work in a play that grapples with these really tough themes… It’s not just the play, but the conversations around the play that you get to see these children engage with that is really amazing.”