The lost-picture show Kirsten Greenidge on 103 Within the Veil BY SALLY CRAGIN

Some pictures are worth more than a thousand words. For up-and-coming young playwright Kirsten Greenidge, photos taken by obscure Boston-based African-American photographer Hubert Collins are an incomparable panorama of a vanished period.

Collins documented the people in his Roxbury neighborhood during the early part of the 20th century and created an œuvre of dignified portraits. "Nobody’s smiling, no teeth are showing, everyone’s dressed up," says the Somerville-based playwright, who has been produced at Actors Theatre of Louisville and had readings at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center and Playwrights Horizons but is about to enjoy her first full-length local outing. Her new play, 103 Within the Veil, to be presented by Company One at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre beginning next Thursday, was inspired by Collins’s photos, which are stored at the Museum of Afro American History.

But when the playwright tried to research Collins the man, she found few facts, just his name in a Boston phone directory with a listing of his profession, janitor, and his race, as was the custom at the time. So she began to invent stories to go with the images. "The joy would be if someone called and said, ‘That’s my uncle.’ But the horror was that someone would call the museum and say, ‘You got it wrong.’ "

One of Greenidge’s favorites shows "two little girls wearing white dresses, with huge ribbons in their hair, standing in front of a wrought-iron fence. What drew me to the picture was that it was . . . " She pauses. " . . . beautiful." These two girls were photographed at later periods of their lives, as were other children in Collins’s neighborhood. "It’s possible they were people who didn’t need to be paid when he sat down to practice. Even when the hats and coats didn’t seem to fit the kids, there were no holes in the clothes. They were dressed as if they were going to a special occasion."

And so Greenidge began, with due caution, to assemble an episodic narrative — what she calls "a theatrical collage." In 103 Within the Veil, Collins and his subjects step forward and share details from their lives. "She’s come up with 15 characters, and each one is so distinct and interesting and specific that it’s really director heaven for me," explains Victoria Marsh, who helms the production.

The staging also has challenging technical aspects, since Greenidge wants to show Collins’s own work. Area artist Wen-ti Tsen has made projections of the photos. "The images start out hazy and fragmented, as if they’d been in developing solution," says Greenidge, who adds that a montage of Collins’s fully developed work will also be shown.

Deeper messages and social issues likewise emerge. "One theme you hear from the characters is, ‘I’m used to looking in books and not seeing myself unless I’m in chains or in abject slavery,’ " says Marsh. Collins’s photographs, in which not a single smile can be found, deliberately contradict the period’s prevailing imagery of African-Americans as Little Black Sambos and Aunt Jemimas. As a character notes in the play: "Teeth grinning like a monkey at the zoo. Like the way they love to see us, laugh at us. It’s best not to smile."

Greenidge continues to be fascinated by the enigmatic photographer. Collins stopped taking photographs in the 1940s, though he lived until 1966. Why? Greenidge doesn’t know, and that bothers her. "There’s always that myth that the cream will rise to the top, and if you’ve got this burning desire, you could work 12 hours a day and paint at night and be an artist. And I wanted to explore this. But what if your whole identity is boiled down to that one little line in the phone book: you’re a janitor. That’s who you are."

103 Within the Veil is presented by Company One at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, 949 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, January 20 through February 5. Tickets are $25, $15 for students, call (866) 811-4111.