Have you ever seen a play that delivered a powerful, poignant, profound message? Well, I definitely did on Friday night as I watched African-American playwright Dominique Morisseau’s “Pipeline” at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. Morisseau brilliantly takes on the problems faced by young Black males in high school. She accomplishes this feat through captivating writing, and by taking footage of high school males fighting in the bathroom and on the bus and combining it with disturbing and repeated references to Richard Wright’s novel “Native Son.” The tragic main character, Bigger Thomas, a young Black male, is pushed too far.
Morisseau manages to weave the elements of this play into an explosive, riveting package, as she sets it in a public high school where the young Black men are routinely fighting. In one scene when a seasoned, older white female teacher has to break up a fight and does so using extreme physical means, students record her role in breaking up the fight. As the white teacher angrily and passionately vents about what just occurred in her classroom, she also blames a security guard for not coming sooner. He explains that he was on the phone with another teacher who had a difficult student in his room. Morisseau clearly lays out the issues that are faced by high school faculty who have to deal with young people who come through the metal detectors with a lot of issues that machines cannot see, issues that the staff then has to deal with.
In this 90-minute play without an intermission, Morisseau allows the audience to look at the young Black teenager from different angles and to also see things from the view of the parents of these troubled young men, who don’t know what to do to keep their sons safe and out of trouble. “Pipeline” also shows you that whether parents pays for their children to attend a private high school upstate or they let them attend a public school, the issues can be the same. Issues of being raised in a single parent home, issues of the anger a young man feels when his
father is not in his life.
The playwright gives the audience a public high school teacher, Nya (stirringly played by Karen Pittman), who has just found out that her son Omari (passionately played by Namir Smallwood) has been fighting at his expensive private high school and is facing severe consequences. Omari is being raised by his mother; his father, Xavier (powerfully played by Morocco Omari), usually sends the child a support check each month. Omari has built up a strong hatred for his father, but at the same time wishes he had some type of relationship with him. Omari has a conflict that wells up inside of him and manifests itself in a violent way.
Omari has a great deal of love for his mother Nya, but he barely tells her how he feels. He confides in his girlfriend Jasmine (vividly played by Heather Velazquez). Jasmine is a young Hispanic girl whose parents are forcing her to attend this private high school, and she is finding out that being around rich girls and being the token poor kid can be worse than being in a ghetto high school. When Omari gets into trouble, the interaction between this young couple also show the frustrations and feelings of hopelessness that youth can face. Feelings that they are comfortable sharing with each other, but
not with their parents.
What Morisseau does with this production, which is so incredible, is she gives young Black males voices for their issues. When the two Black boys fight in the classroom of the white teacher, Laurie (dramatically and at time amusingly portrayed by Tasha Lawrence), it is the Black male security guard, Dun (brilliantly portrayed by Jaime Lincoln Smith), who explains that these boys fighting stems from issues of frustrations and anger that Black males have
been experiencing for years.
When Omari explains to his mother Nya what happened in school, she is so upset she asks him to give her instructions on how to be his parent. When he explains what happened to his father, it’s a completely different and fuller explanation and one that the father proves not to be ready to hear. This scene, which I will not go into detail about, has got to be one of the most powerful son and absentee father scene’s ever put on a stage—it is a scene that pierces the heart and soul!
Morisseau ends the play by giving parents some common sense advice on how to deal with your children, and, sitting there, I felt like she was talking to me. This play is for everyone to experience for themselves. It does what theater is supposed to do—it opens your eyes to a situation you could not see clearly and then it helps you to relate it in some way to your own life and start on the road to understanding an issue better.
“Pipeline” has cohesive, captivating direction by Lileana Blain-Cruz.