At the height of the pandemic, we wondered what artists would have to say about that disconcerting era, once it was finally over and people could gather again in theaters. Many of us expected a great contextualizing flood of plays and films about isolation and lockdowns and Zooms and the other detritus of the era.

We were wrong. In reality, there have been very few such shows and movies.

Why not? Simple. Studios, producers and other gatekeepers rapidly figured out that people did not want to go back there. At times, one can be struck by how much those two years or so, and what they did to us, have been confined to an Orwellian memory hole.

Take Kirsten Greenidge’s “Morning, Noon, and Night,” a domestic comedy about life during the pandemic, first seen in early 2024 and now receiving its Midwest premiere via Shattered Globe Theatre at Theater Wit. Even when she first opened the play in a small East Coast theater, Greenidge insisted to interviewers that this was not a COVID play, even though COVID forms the backdrop and is the cause of many of the characters’ problems.

Greenidge also looks forward here to what is very much the most drastic of the post-COVID issues born of that time — the coming of artificial intelligence as a means for solving our problems, and what is looking more and more like a blurring of reality and simulacra.

Greenidge weaves her morality play, warning of the dangers of social media and lamenting the changes in human communication, into a family setting that’s economically stressed from the pandemic fallout. Events are centered on the chaotic Mia (Kristin E. Ellis), whose cluttered house is emblematic of the messiness of her life as she tries to navigate her difficult relationship with daughters Alex (estranged and unseen) and Dailyn (very much seen and heard and played here by Emefa Dzodzomenyo), a teen whose modes of conversation and ideas are altogether too influenced by online seductions.

Mia is planning a hopeful birthday party for Alex and Dailyn has her ideas about what that should and should not be. Mia is clearly the author’s main concern here and the center of the play’s POV, especially when her fraught party plans are upended by the arrival of Miss Candice (Leslie Ann Sheppard), a kind of Mary Poppins who may or may not be of our carbon-based world, and whose ministrations may or not be family friendly, at least in the long-term sense of that word.

I think the main point that Greenidge is making is that the impact of COVID on families lingered long beyond lockdown, especially given how much time we spent with screens. Indeed, this feels to me very much like a play a writer would write after being stuck for months in a house with teens, aching to live their lives and sometimes seeing their loving parents as captors, even as moms and dads just tried to hold their lives together.

That’s a valid point, for sure and “Morning, Noon, and Night” is an empathetic and intelligent play, as is typical with this writer. But it’s unwieldy in places, and once Miss Candice enters the fray, we move from social commentary into science fiction and that stresses out the structure. I kept thinking how well written the individual scenes were (they are well-acted, too, in director AmBer Montgomery’s lively production) but somehow that never quite translates to a cohesive experience.

Emefa Dzodzomenyo plays Dailyn in Shattered Globe Theatre’s “Morning, Noon, and Night” at Theater Wit. (Michael Brosilow)

Plays about technology, especially plays that are anti-technology, are very difficult to pull off in the live theater, due, I think, to the difficult of really representing tech developments, or even tech impacts, truthfully. The best of the genre allow for more complexity than this one and don’t try quite so hard to shoehorn so much into 90 minutes. Montgomery’s production also gets trapped at times in the characters, the scenes and the high-style departures from reality, when it needed to focus more on the kinds of honest and recognizable truths that build both dramatic tension and an audience’s belief and empathy.

But while this hardly is a fully satisfying show, I still think you’ll likely enjoy the acting from Ellis and Dzodzomenyo, both excellent as mother and daughter, navigating the push and pull of life in a time so quickly forgotten.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Review: “Morning, Noon, and Night” (3 stars)

When: Through March 28

Where: Shattered Globe at Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave.

Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Tickets: $40-60 at 773-975-8150 and shatteredglobe.org

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/03/03/review-morning-noon-shattered-globe/