Negative history 103 ways to retrieve a lost artist BY IRIS FANGER
	103 Within the Veil By Kirsten Greenidge. Directed by Victoria Marsh. Set and projections by Wen-ti Tsen. Lighting by Jason Freimark. Costumes by Joy Adams. Sound by Frank A. Shefton. Historical consultant Kerri Greenidge. With Akiba Abaka, Ramona Alexander, Khalil Flemming, Andrea Fleurant, James Milord, Cliff Odle, Taylor Parker, and Kaili Turner. Presented by Company One at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre through February 5.

Playwright Kirsten Greenidge has taken a belief that the simple facts of a seemingly ordinary life are never really simple or ordinary and transformed it into a sometimes evocative two-plus-hours on stage. The problem is that, for all the excellent writing and historical conjecture in 103 Within the Veil: A Theatrical Collage, the material Greenidge mines seems better suited to a literary format — perhaps a novel — embellished with illustrations. As a theater piece, with little plot and less dramatic tension, it presents you with a diluted experience.

The play is based on the true story of the life, death, and rediscovery of an African-American Bostonian, Hubert Collins, who ran a photography studio in Roxbury. At the time of his death, in 1966, he was labeled for posterity by his Boston phonebook listing as a "janitor." Then in 1976, a box of 103 glass negatives of his work surfaced, photographs taken in the early part of the 20th century. The portraits, projected on white flags hung above the periphery of an almost bare playing space designed by Wen-ti Tsen, show serious black folks dressed in dignified clothing and staring straight into a lens that invests them with a pride of personage that probably belies their circumstances.

Looking to redeem Collins’s reputation, Greenidge has taken the respect the photographer showed his sitters — and their aspirations, as suggested by the pictures — as a central theme of her play. Another thread is the quest shared by the characters for equality, whether they’re black artists or African-Americans yearning for others opportunities that have been denied them. And the anger that Greenidge’s Collins expresses at the suppression of his talent is paralleled by the eloquent monologues in street-smart patois that she invents for the play’s contemporary narrator, Virg.

Since little is known about either Collins’s personal or his professional life, Greenidge has imagined him as being surrounded by some of the people in his pictures, in a succession of tenuously connected vignettes. But the sassy Virg is her most original contribution and, as portrayed by an in-your-face Ramona Alexander, reason enough to see this production.

The "collage" begins with Virg’s first monologue, in which, as a waitress in a fast-food joint, she warns us off the hamburgers and the French fries. Each time Virg switches jobs, she comes on in a new workplace uniform; the series, which includes a pointy-headed soft-ice-cream headdress and a pretzel costume, becomes increasingly demeaning. She accuses an unidentified "them" of giving customers who don’t know any better "flavors" concocted in some secret place in New Jersey rather than real sustenance. Alexander portrays an intelligent woman who knows she deserves better than to be waitressing and cleaning office buildings at night. And she could have a better job if only she’d been given an appropriate education.

Other characters deprived by a racist society include the elegantly dressed Hammond (James Milord), a perceptive man of fastidious tastes, and a young wife (Kaili Turner) who hopes for a career behind an oak desk and a typewriter rather than behind a baby carriage. The ensemble includes a trio of charming children (Khalil Flemming, Andrea Fleurant, and Taylor Parker) who find the glass negatives in the dark, abandoned basement of the house where Collins lived, as well as the photographer (Cliff Odle) and his wife (Akiba Abaka), both of whom are underwritten until he’s allowed an impassioned outburst near the end. Kudos to the actors, including the children, for delivering convincing portraits in multiple roles.

It’s no surprise that Greenidge was drawn to Collins and his story. But the polemics of social protest that the playwright puts in the mouths of many of her characters overwhelm the theme of the neglected artist. Her play’s theatrical needs are sidelined by political concerns.