Pipeline
Dominique Morisseau
African-American Shakespeare Company
“It’s a gamble … You send your young man out into the world everyday … But you don’t know … You have no idea if they’re safe … No idea if someone will try to expire them because they are too young, or too Black, or too threatening … Or just too too.”
Divorced and now single mom of a late teen son, Nya, powerfully expresses the aching fear of so many mothers like her – a mother who is also a caring teacher in an inner-city school where so many Brown and Black boys become part of the ‘pipeline’ of school-to-street-to prison. In her 2017 play Pipeline, Dominique Morisseau pens the excruciatingly moving, potent, and timely struggle of a mother hoping to save her son from an educational system rigged against him and all other kids of color like him. In the caring and capable hands of director L. Peter Callender and with a cast superb and stellar in every dimension, the African-American Shakespeare Company stages an often heart-stopping, a sometimes heart-breaking, yet in the end a heart-warming Pipeline.
In a hope to protect their son from the fate of so many urban, Black youth, Nya and her ex, Xavier, have sent their son, Omari, to an exclusive, private boarding school; but what they have not anticipated is the isolation, stereotyping, and pressure of his being one of the few faces of color there. On a day when Omari already is dealing with pent-up, unexpressed frustration and hurt, a teacher pepper his class with pressing questions about Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son, asking what makes the Black man, Bigger Thomas, kill a white woman. Looking directly at Omari as if the only Black kid in class should know the answer why, the teacher asks directly, “What made the animal in him explode?” At that, Omari reacts and ends up shoving the teacher against the board.
Now Omari is suspended and is facing expulsion and even legal charges – especially after students cell phones immediately record the subsequent shouting and the shove that are now videos gone viral. To Nya’s horror, her supposedly protected, intelligent son is suddenly ‘in the pipeline,’ leaving her feeling like “I’m flipping off the edge of the earth, and there are no answers.”
Leontyne Mbele-Mbong is mind-bogglingly perfect in the varied and over-lapping roles of teacher, mom, faculty colleague, ex-lover, and ex-wife Nya. At times so calm and composed, at times so down-hearted and frightened, and at other times full of mounting agitation and anger, Nya is at all times palpably, deeply committed to her son’s future and survival. The actor’s Nya shows an incredible wide range of emotions, demeanors, stances, and expressions. Anyone who has ever been a parent of a teen can readily relate to her initial disbelief of her son’s actions and her impatience with his stumbling, hesitant response to her questions of ‘why’ and ‘what were you thinking.’ Probably only a mother of a young Black man in today’s world can truly understand the deer-in-the-headlights look of fright and horror that shows in her eyes as she considers what may now happen to him. But when Nya turns to her son and in a whispering plea and an near-exhausted spirit, “Guide me … Give me the answer” on how to help him, Leontyne Mbele-Mbong is at that moment Every Parent who has faced a crisis with a child where a next-step is not at all obvious.
Atlantis Clay is equally stunning and often spell-bounding as Omari, encompassing an incredible combination of youthful fervor and capacity for love (of mother and of girlfriend) along with that of a fear of seemingly inevitable doom and of an inner, inescapable rage ready to erupt and lash out at any moment at whoever happens to be near. With his girlfriend, Jasmine, Omari is the kind of charming, playful, flirting teen many guys of seventeen are. With his mother, Omari is one moment stubbornly non-forthcoming; the next, outwardly worried about her well-being. The teen goes quickly from boiling over in anger with his mom to seeking her lap and her solace. In all cases, Omari’s eyes show confusion as if saying, “Why me?” Finally, with his father, Omari stands eye-to-eye as now a near-man expressing a barrage of disappointment, resentment, and finally resignation. In each and all, Atlantis Clay excels as an Omari for whom we too have hope but cannot help but fear the societal cards are just too stacked against him.
Along with these two award-worthy performances are four others of much merit. Kelly Rinehart is a take-no-bullshit warrior of a teacher, Laurie, who continues to come to work along with Nya in this inner-city school where metal detectors greet teachers and students every morning and where she recently was attacked with a parent’s knife after giving a failing grade. Her Laurie exudes in the kind of energy, humor, and zeal that has helped her be a survivor in an education setting where the odds are against teachers like her being successful.
Ije Success is Omari’s girlfriend at the Academy who also has felt the same uncomfortable spotlight placed on her as one of the few students of color and not of rich, family backgrounds. Her Jasmine speaks with passion, expressing in near-poetic terms what it is like to be a Black student in a white privileged environment.
The men of Nya’s life are her ex, Xavier, and an obvious love interest of the near past, Dun. Michael Gene Sullivan is the three-piece-suited marketing exec, Xavier, who has been lately a mostly absent father to Omari and who enters this crisis as a “I-can-do-this-better” intruder. Bringing blowhard proclamations delivered in stop-and-start phrases and accompanied with back-and-forth pacing and gigantic motions of arms, his Xavier is commanding on stage but not in a good way for Nya or for Omari. At the same time, his Xavier does solicit our empathy and even some sympathy as we witness a huge act of integrity in a climatic confrontation between him and his son.
School security guard Dun (Gary Moore) is much the opposite of Xavier: easy-going, amiable, and expressive. His eyes sparkle around Nya who now has no time for him, but his desire to be helpful and understanding is no less thwarted.
A stand-off of steely, eye-to-eye silence between Xavier and Dun is one of several, dramatic, one-on-one pairings – including Jasmine and Nya, Nya and Omari, Laurie and Dun and especially Omari and Xavier – that L. Peter Callender directs with great patience for pause and with an ear for dialogue that sizzles. Directorial insight shines forth in a scene where Nya’s nagging premonitions of her son’s eventual fate are played out by a manicly roaming Omari who takes the phrase-crafted script of the playwright and delivers the personification of what is going on in her head even as she is trying to teach her class.
The impossible conditions of the current, urban school where students and police intermingle in both security alerts and violent confrontations are introduced to us as an entering audience by a series of real-life, stage-filling videos that are startling and sickening – just part of the outstanding projections designed by Ramiro Segura to provide cogent settings and context. The lighting of Kevin Myrick focuses our attention as characters reflect in solo moments, highlights the tenseness of character duels, and brightens to the harsh tones of schoolroom, florescent tubes. Raymond Archie’s sound design ranging from thumping rap music to sudden school bells, Guilio C. Perrone’s design of school, dorm, and apartment sets all laid out on one stage for non-stop scene shifts; and Nia Jacobs’ costumes that speak loudly the personalities and dispositions of all six characters complete a creative team’s note-worthy contributions.
Laced throughout Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline script are the short verses of Gwendolyn Brooks’ 1959 poem, “We Real Cool,” words of teen boys outside a pool hall defying convention and authority (“We left school, we lurk late, …”) and leading to a conclusion sounding inevitable, “We die soon.” That is the fear that haunts Nya. That is a conclusion that in her head she hears her son sputtering time and again. And while the play ends with at least a temporary resolution between mom and son, that message of do-or-die urgency is the one the playwright wants us to hear loud and clear in the hope that, in the program words of Director Callender, we “lean forward, be engage … get involved.”
Congratulations to African-American Shakespeare Company for this compelling, eye-opening, and massively important production of Pipeline.
Rating: 5 E
A Theatre Eddys Best Bet Production
Pipeline continues through in production by the African-American Shakespeare Company through March 31, 2024, at the Taube Atrium Theatre in the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, 401 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco. General admission tickets are available at https://www.african-americanshakes.org .
Photo Credits: Joseph Giammarco
