A PIPELINE TO THE TROUBLED SOUL
One of our era’s greatest dramatists, Dominique Morisseau (Skeleton Crew, Ain’t Too Proud) sheds light on the complicated realities of urban African-American communities. Her 2017 Pipeline, which opened last night at The Art of Acting Studio, concerns Nya Joseph (beautifully underplayed by Fadhia Carmelle Marcelin), a divorced mom and teacher at a battlefront high school who is devoting her life to keep her son Omari (an in-the-moment, watchable Nate Memba) from getting sucked into the pipeline — the much-reviled “school-to-prison” conduit that keeps minority kids from any outcome but incarceration, soft or hard. After a shaky start and some mannered acting with a tinge of amateurism, director Bryan Keith‘s revival hits home, and the 90-minute bare-bones production resounds wholeheartedly, thanks especially to the knockout script. It’s shocking that this essential drama is just now getting its L.A. premiere.
Fadhia Carmelle Marcelin, Nate Memba
Omari has been sent by his wealthy but uninvolved dad Xavier (Jon Joseph Gentry) to a private school upstate. He’s meant to get a better chance than Nya’s students ever can. But Omari has brought with him a toxic legacy, a lifetime of rage for “respect” against the dad who was never there and the dreams he fears he’s denied.
Jon Joseph Gentry, Fadhia Carmelle Marcelin
In an incident that could send Omari into a black hole of repeat offenses, this raw-nerved teenager is faced with a “third strike” expulsion for slamming his teacher against the smartboard. On a bad day when he just wanted to be left alone, Omari is thrown into a blind fury when this uncaring adult closely questions him about his resemblance to Bigger Thomas, the reflexive murderer in Richard Wright’s Native Son. Omari takes it painfully personally, this cross-examination that likens him to an animal with social limitations who can only prove he’s real by striking out. Has life imitated art in the worst way?
Morisseau enlarges the context for her showdown between son and parents and son and school: She offers her own witnesses for the prosecution. Laurie (fierce Jennifer Sorenson) is Nya’s white colleague, a traumatized teacher who’s all but burnt out over always being “at war.” She seethes with the frustration of refereeing angry boys who have “grown down.” She just wants to teach promising citizens in what she ambiguously calls “my den.” She dreads getting stuck fixing other people’s errors.
Omari Williams, Jennifer Sorenson
Then there’s the school’s low-paid and too-tested security guard Dun (Omari Williams), stretched to breaking, is caught in the crossfire as everything he sees seems to conspire against giving youths of color a second or even first chance.
Finally, there’s Omari’s girlfriend Jasmine (Ari Sucar), a proud and frustrated would-be lover who is loyal to a guy who keeps disappearing on her. Refusing to fit in with the mean white girls in this educational enclave, Jasmine finds common cause with Omari, even as he needs to feel that nobody “gets” him.
Ari Sucar, Nate Memba
To the playwright’s credit, we see six embattled characters from all sides — without judgment and from the inside out. But the moral “ground zero” here is Nya. Fighting off panic disorders and emotional paralysis, Nya agonizes that she can do nothing right to keep Omari from self-destructing. But she can’t abandon him as his father seems to have done. This English teacher dreads the thought that Gwendolyn Brooks’s urban lyric We Real Cool — a lament for and from doomed drop-outs (akin to Langston Hughes’s Raisin in the Sun) — will come true for her sole son, especially the last line: “We die soon.”
No more than Nya with her son, Morisseau refuses to give up on her often-eloquent survivors. They won’t be counted out to “die soon.” By play’s end, a ton of love and light gets shown on a harsh, seemingly unforgiving closed world.
Omari Williams, Fadhia Carmelle Marcelin
Pipeline
Harold Clurman Laboratory Theater Company
Art of Acting Studio, 1017 N. Orange Drive in Hollywood
Wed-Sat at 8; ends on August 19, 2023 EXTENDED to August 26, 2023
for tickets ($18), call 323.601.5310 or visit Ovation Tix
thirty minutes prior to curtain, remaining seats are Pay What You Can
