By Ross

The black and white video images projected onto the large bare wall resonate with a power that seeps onto the stage and surrounds the actors of Pipeline, the strongly formed play by Dominique Morisseau (ATC’s Skeleton Crew) that was seen a while back at the Lincoln Center Theater. Now, during these difficult times, it can be streamed for your home viewing. It’s an unsettling time for all of us, for different reasons.  As someone just wrote, we are all in the same storm, but not in the same boat. Your boat may be more structurally sound, or more crowded. You might find loneliness or financial ruin in your boat, and it might be sinking.  It’s all perspective.  This play tells another unsettling story all on its own, one that builds and defines itself throughout this complex emotionally heart-wrenching story. The images (projections by Hanna Wasileski) and this play, directed with a strong guiding hand by Lileana Blain-Cruz (LCT’s War) with a simple and a perfectly essential design (sets: Matt Saunders; costumes: Montana Levi Blanco; lighting: Yi Zhao; sound: Justin Ellington) tries to find meaning in its rage. Not necessarily his rage, but ‘the’ rage; the rage of the black American. And the fight to be seen, maybe as something other than that rage. To be seen as a whole person, outside of societal conventions. To be seen as human and real.

Karen Pittman (Broadway’s spectacular Disgraced) as the mother and teacher, Nya, begins with a strong heartfelt plea to her ex-husband and the father of her child, Xavier (Morocco Omari). The words instantly connect us to her frustration and her pain. Fear and confusion dribble out as she attempts engagement with her ex-husband regarding their child. She’s frightened by what has happened. Scared of its meaning and its impact, and her conflicted emotional connection to her past marriage. But then she rethinks, and adjusts herself, trying with some difficulty to return to the powerful teacher and mother she wants to see herself as. It’s a compelling few minutes, in an equally compelling play, one that borders on the cliche but doesn’t fall victim to that trap.

A poem of such power by Gwendolyn Brooks is recited and explored within Nya’s classroom. One from an edition by Harper Collins, a commercial white-owned publisher, and another by Broadside Press, an independent Black press in Detroit that embraces the rule-challenging graffiti-style edge that Brooks has intended.  The scene is tight in its deconstruction and explanation. To be seen side by side is where the sharpness lives, and the comparative presentations fly hardest. That ideal, not embodied here, demonstrates a complication where whiteness attempts to absorb and appropriate Blackness. In that contrast, it burns the deepest, where all its lean provocative meaning cannot be denied. “WE REAL COOL” cascades with an incredible power when taught with such insight. It emblazons the dynamic and therefore we cannot take our eyes off Pittman’s Nya as she is swept up in its inner tremor.

It’s a compelling idea, that is most forcibly stated by his girlfriend, Jasmine, a strong but slightly stereotypically ghettoized portrayal by Heather Velazquez (Goodman Theatre’s Another Word for Beauty).  Her interactions with both him and later on with Nya are some of the most pointed observances in the play. She sees something that maybe the others are missing, as she is that Latina teenage girl, sent from her own struggling neighborhood and familial surrounding to attend a well-heeled private school. She sees the way the others see her and her boyfriend, and she has no problem vocalizing her discontent. Maybe that will be a thing that saves her.

Beyond the stellar work of the main opponents in this engagement, one of the funniest creations, even when it is coated in rage and frustration, is the work of Tasha Lawrence (MTC’s Good People) as the other teacher, Laurie, at the public school where Nya works. Lawrence shakes the bones of that school staff room with her defiant rage and undying devotion to the task set before her, to try to teach these kids, against all odds, something of relevance and use. She is a firecracker, and she ‘fuckin’ knows it.  So does Dun (Jaime Lincoln Smith) the school’s security guard, who is no match for her fire and her fight.  I only wish Smith’s character was given a bit more to do, as it seems there is a lot more beneath his smile and stance.