Indoor live theatre returned in a big way to Soulpepper this week, with an incandescent and urgent performance of Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline, which kicks off the theatre’s 25th anniversary season.
A taut 100 minutes without an intermission, the play’s title is metaphorical. It refers to societal conduits that are all too efficient and effective in transporting American and Canadian Black youth directly from school to prison.
The play, directed crisply by Artistic Director Weyni Mengesha, presents this pipeline not as a monolithic construct whose pressure can be alleviated by flipping some valve. This is not the 1995 movie Dangerous Minds with its white saviour Michelle Pfeiffer (and in case we’re thinking it is, an early comedic reference quickly disabuses us of the notion).
No, the pipeline is a multi-dimensional wicked problem brought to emotional life by a deeply skilled, nearly all-Black cast playing multi-faceted characters who engross, challenge and refuse to lapse into mere tropes.
Akosua Amo-Adem is Nya, whose multiple roles—as struggling custodial mother, estranged wife, and exhausted public school teacher—enmesh her in the pipeline. She is a mercurial combination of wry, frazzled, assertive, sensitive and tortured. Beneath everything, a spine of steel drives her to try—some way, any way—to understand, advocate for, and help make things right for her son Omari . . . who is caught in the flow of that pipeline.
Tony Ofori’s Omari is one of just two students we see and hear from directly in Pipeline. And he doesn’t even attend the urban high school Nya teaches at. His parents have sent him to an upscale private school in hopes of giving him a better chance of winning on the racially tilted academic playing field. The play centers around an explosive moment at Omari’s school which proves the futility of this ambition.
Ofori is a magnetic slow burn. He moves convincingly from what we first take for a callous, shallow boyfriend to a tortured and powerful self-advocate who fights—plaintively and exhaustingly—to understand and to be understood. He deftly brings to life a range of roles: caring son, angry son, vulnerable young man, rage-filled boy who has been backed into a corner – even spectral avatar.
Chelsea Russell’s Jasmine is Omari’s private school girlfriend. The other student we meet in the play, she is a fast-talking dreamer with a magnetic mix of perceptiveness, assertion and self-assured naivete. Whenever she is onstage, Russell brings a welcome rush of energy.
Kevin Hanchard’s Xavier, who is Omari’s father and Nya’s ex-husband, is a confident, coiled and complex presence. Having funded Omari’s private school education, he reveals himself to be as entangled as Omari in the complex dynamics of class, race, and multi-generational grievance.
The final two roles in the play are Nya’s high school staffmates. Mazin Elsadig’s Dun is a security guard who jumps from background to foreground with a powerful but grounded performance. And Kristen Thomson’s Laurie, the only non-Black cast member, is a weary fellow teacher whom we first take for insensitive and racist . . . though we’re not allowed to stay there.
In fact, we don’t get to write any of these characters off. Nor do we get to hitch our allegiances comfortably to any character and ride them uncomplicatedly to the play’s close.
A student strikes a teacher. A teacher strikes a student. A ha! Here there be villains, right? But wait… there is so much beneath these sensational headlines. It’s not so simple.
It’s just not simple at all.
Again and again throughout Pipeline, the emotional and moral ground shifts – wickedly and devastatingly. All of the characters are eloquent and passionately righteous in their points of view and the sometimes extreme actions they undertake to support them. But at the same time they are clear-eyed about the systemic traps they are implicated in. Never myopic, they can see – and even grant the validity – of how others can view things differently.
For the pipeline is bigger than they are. Invisible yet omnipresent, it makes students themselves almost an abstraction. We hear a lot about the students at Nya and Laurie’s high school. And their reality is evoked at the nexus of Lorenzo Savoini’s emblematic set and projection design, and in the atmospheric lighting design of Kimberly Purtell and sound design of Lyon Smith: in the sparse classroom sets, in haunting recitations of a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, and in digital image collages.
We hear about and catch glimpses of these other students . . . but we never really see them. It feels metaphorically apt.
And for the six characters we do know? The complications of their complex context are everything. They end up in places that vary from shattering and dangerous to affirmative and cautiously hopeful. The pipeline is a truly wicked problem that has been richly realized, but of course, it can’t be solved in the play’s short running time.
Getting back indoors at Soulpepper has been a long time coming. How wonderful to be welcomed back by theatre so modern, so thought-provoking, and so brilliantly acted that it not only reminds us of what we’ve been missing . . . it pushes us to hunger for more things we’ve never seen before.
Reserve tickets to Pipeline here.
© Scott Sneddon, SesayArts Magazine, 2022
