Conversation: Martin Sherman & Kirsten Greenidge

Playwrights Martin Sherman and Kirsten Greenidge on teaching, rehearsals, and sustaining a career in theater

Martin Sherman portrait by Alun Callender, Kirsten Greenidge portrait by Philip Keith

CFA Alumni

Playwrights Martin Sherman and Kirsten Greenidge on Teaching, Rehearsals, and Sustaining a Career in Theater

December 19, 2023

Mara Sassoon

In Martin Sherman’s one-woman play Rose, the titular protagonist is a Jewish refugee who recounts the trajectory of her life, from surviving the Warsaw Ghetto to becoming a hotelier in Miami Beach. “It looks at Jewish life in the 20th century, but what is strange and scary is that it’s more relevant now than it was when it premiered about 24 years ago,” Sherman says of the show, which wrapped up a run in London’s West End in mid-June 2023. “It’s become eerily contemporary. Also, as it happens, the character was born in the Ukraine. So, it’s taken on all of that too.”

Sherman (’60) is best known for his play Bent, about the persecution of gay men during the Holocaust, which premiered in 1979 and starred Sir Ian McKellen. A 1980 Tony nominee for Best Play, Sherman adapted it into a film in 1997 starring Clive Owen.

In early June 2023, CFA’s editor sat down with Sherman, along with Kirsten Greenidge, a playwright and CFA associate professor of theater, to discuss their careers and how they approach their craft. Greenidge’s notable works include Baltimore, about race relations on a college campus, and Milk Like Sugar, winner of the 2012 Obie Award for playwriting, about a teen who makes a pregnancy pact with her friends. In the following conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Sherman and Greenidge talk about how their passion for playwriting developed, the challenges of teaching the craft, and sustaining a career in the theater industry.

CFA: Martin, a production of your play Rose recently opened on the West End.

Martin Sherman: This is the first big revival in England, and it’s with the most magnificent actress named Maureen Lipman, who I actually wrote it for. She had been in an earlier play of mine, but she was [originally] too young to do it because the character is 80.

Kirsten Greenidge: After 24 years, did you rewrite any of it?

MS: No, but I cut some stuff. You can always do that.

KG: [Laughs.] That’s true.

MS: You can always cut, but I think it’s very, very dangerous to rewrite an older play because you’re a different person [than when you wrote it]. Even if there are things that you’re not that comfortable with now, that’s who you were. And I think you have to leave it. Tennessee Williams kept rewriting his plays. I think it was dangerous.

Now, I’m wondering—how do you teach, Kirsten? I think playwriting is the most difficult thing in the world to teach.

KG: I think so, too, and I’ve been teaching for a long time. I can teach how to navigate through things like writer’s block, researching, representation, and the basics—structure, what elements “should” be in a play. I think most of us tend to teach the way we were taught, and I was taught very much on a workshop model. So, some of my more effective playwriting classes are just hearing the work out loud and giving feedback.

MS: That’s fascinating. When I was at BU, there was no such thing as a playwriting course. It didn’t exist. Nor did it exist anywhere. How does teaching affect your writing?

KG: In a good semester, I’m able to get into a really great work-life balance. In a not great semester, sometimes I am pushing the work toward my breaks. The great thing about teaching is your breaks are predictable. One of the great things that Susan Mickey, [director of the School of Theatre], and [CFA Dean] Harvey Young are doing is making sure that all the faculty are having more time and more opportunities to do their professional work, to maintain that side of their lives while also teaching.

MS: That’s magnificent. By the way, I just read Milk Like Sugar. It is the most wonderful play.

KG: Oh, thank you. Thank you.

MS: It completely takes you into a world that I wouldn’t have been in and makes it so alive—and so funny. It’s beautifully constructed. It’s an absolutely gorgeous play.

KG: Thank you. Milk Like Sugar grew out of a commission from Theater Masters and The La Jolla Playhouse. They sent me to the Aspen Ideas Festival to get a bunch of ideas and then make one of them into a play. At the festival, there was a discussion about how to help young girls in at-risk communities, and a statistic was being floated around that the older a person is when they have their first child, often the more stable they are health-wise and economically. It made me think about what opportunities are open to some young women when they do get pregnant at a very young age in our country. That idea stuck with me. At the time, there was also this story circulating on the news where it was rumored that a group of girls at a high school in Massachusetts had made a pact to all get pregnant at the same time. It’s since been debunked, but these ideas and themes began to take root in my mind.

Did you get to attend rehearsals for Rose? Are you a playwright who loves rehearsals?

MS: Yes, and I love rehearsals. I think that’s part of the deal of being a playwright. Half of your artistic life is solitary, but the other half is communal, and I can’t imagine a life without both halves. I write for it to be acted. It’s not literature; it’s something that has to come alive with the actors and the director. I have to be part of that.

KG: I focus a lot on impressing upon students to be present in the rehearsal room because the play is basically only half done when you step into that first rehearsal.

I love rehearsals. I think that’s part of the deal of being a playwright. Half of your artistic life is solitary, but the other half is communal, and I can’t imagine a life without both halves.

Martin Sherman

MS: There’s a protocol and a technique to being a playwright in a rehearsal. I feel very strongly that playwrights should not only study playwriting but should also study acting—not to be an actor, but to understand what an actor’s process is. I think that’s crucial.

KG: I agree.

CFA: Martin and Kirsten, I’m wondering about the moment that you both realized you wanted to become playwrights.

MS: I wrote my first play when I was 12. I started going to the theater when I was probably about seven. We lived across the river from Philadelphia. Plays would come to Philadelphia on the way to New York or on the way back from New York. I guess my mother couldn’t afford a babysitter, so she would take me with her to the theater. She took me with her for about two years before she became ill, and then I kept going by myself. I loved it. Here I was, a child sitting in the theater watching a Tennessee Williams play, surrounded by adults. [Laughs.]

KG: The age of 12 was a big year for me in terms of playwriting as well. We took a trip in seventh grade to see Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at the Huntington Theatre here in Boston. After seeing that play, I was like, “I want to do that.” I just didn’t know how to be a playwright because I’m not a man and I’m not white. So, when I was young, I came up with a pen name, an alter ego that didn’t sound like that person was Black or ethnic in any way. I will never tell anybody that pen name. I told my parents once and let’s just say they’re New Englanders—they’re very honest. They were just like, “Really? Why that?”

One of the pieces that made me fall in love with American literature was A Streetcar Named Desire. My two best friends and I would read that play over and over. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized we had no idea what that play is really about. I watched the film version last week with my husband and I was thinking about how I was 12 and saying these words, and I had no idea what was happening.

MS: When we are that age, dealing with plays by people like Tennessee Williams, I think there’s something very strange in that. We didn’t understand the plays, but part of us…

KG: Part of us definitely did. On a core level.

MS: Yeah, it’s an interesting dynamic.

CFA: I’d like to talk about some of the topics and themes you both explore in your works and why you gravitated toward them.

KG: My work deals with the intersection of race, gender, and class in some way, and I think it is inspired by some of the writers that I came up admiring, such as Suzan-Lori Parks. In one of her essays, she talks about how just having a group of Black people onstage is a revolutionary act. Another seminal playwright and work for me was Lorraine Hansberry and her A Raisin in the Sun.

MS: I just write what I think I need to write. It’s whatever makes me want to write—and most things don’t. It’s such a joy when suddenly there is something I want to write a play about. When that moment occurs, it’s from heaven.

One of the most seminal plays that formed me as a writer was also by Lorraine Hansberry. It was The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. It taught me that you can write about anything you feel you need to write about, and that you mustn’t be afraid of what anybody will think. It was a radically brave play. She is the greatest example of what a playwright should be.

KG: I’m just wondering, how do you keep writing plays? I’m compelled to write them, but I’m at a point now where theaters are going through the backlog of things they didn’t produce during the pandemic and new voices are coming into the field. As a mid-career playwright, I wonder if anyone even wants my plays anymore.

MS: That’s a real problem. What I face now is incredible ageism. I can’t get a new play read. I remember when I was much younger, hearing about writers who were my age now—famous writers who couldn’t get their work read. That’s always been the case. What does a young playwright have to look forward to if they can’t think that they have an entire life in the theater? It’s so essential to have voices from all generations. Something that I found that has helped me a lot is that I also write films. It’s not quite the same as writing a play. It’s very different technically, but in terms of passion, it means I can exercise my craft if I’m not writing a play. Also, the ageism is not as intense in that world as it is in the theater.

KG: Thank you for sharing. That’s been on my mind a lot, especially as I look ahead at a summer of not teaching.

MS: But it’s so wonderful that you still do it.

KG: When I’m writing or in rehearsal, there’s really nowhere else I’d rather be. Do you feel like you use different parts of your brain for writing for film versus theater?

MS: The big difference is that when you write a play, it’s very much about talking and dialogue. If you’ve just written a film, and then you go back to writing a play, the joy of being able to articulate is so fantastic. But then, when you go back to writing for film, the joy in not having to do that is enormous. We know how to write films because we have in our heads the structures of writing for actors and writing dramatically.

KG: I will take that with me in the summer.

MS: You should. I think Milk Like Sugar would be a wonderful film.

KG: Wow, thank you. I will put that on my summer to-do list.