What started with another presentation ended up being the most personal and nuanced creative experience I’ve encountered in my time in D.C. thus far. When I first visited Studio Theatre’s Website, I grew weary of their use of edgy to describe the range of contemporary plays that they put on. Edgy is such an objective term and edginess itself is a spectrum of sorts. Therefore, I knew this was something I just had to experience in person.
We kicked off the evening with a personalized tour and Q&A discussion with Studio Theatre’s Associate Literary Arts Director Lauren Halverson — a wonderful experience, of course. We spoke about funding, behind the scenes operations in smaller theatres, the Automobile Shop-turned-community theatre that we stood in, and the many changes that the theatre has seen. It has stood in the heart of Logan Circle for longer than most of the neighborhoods’ current residents.
We were introduced to the play (and its much larger theme) by the projection of real video of the violence that strikes countless under-resourced schools — the type of violence that students encounter quite often. The play opens up around Omari, the play’s protagonist, and the specific reactions of his loved ones about the violent encounter that he just had with his teacher. This encounter is teased for quite some time until we figure out what actually happened. Meanwhile, the playwright introduces us to fellow teacher’s lounge regular, Lorrie. The audience grows to love Lorrie and then boom(!) her job is threatened by the fact that she broke up a potentially deadly fight by hitting a student with a broom. Throughout her struggle with the potential repercussions of her actions, several larger themes are teased out. The one that stood out the most is articulated by the school security guard: the anger felt by the school’s under-represented students is an anger that’s older than the bricks that made up the school. The statement nods to the ongoing legacy of slavery that negatively and systematically permeates through black culture today. It’s an incredibly necessary point and it acts as a segue into the revelation of the reason why Omari attacked his teacher. In a well written monologue, Omari reveals that his teacher called him specifically in front of his all white class to speak to the experience of the person of color in an assigned reading. After refusing to, Omari was pressured to do so which led to him trying to walk out of the classroom before being blocked by his teacher. When he shoved his teacher out the way, Omari vividly describes how he saw his dad in that moment and how, in the moment, it was his father who he wished he was pushing.
Pipeline humanizes the young black male figure in a world that criminalizes it. The nuanced understandings of systematic oppression and its’ roots were amazing to see in a play being shown in a highly gentrified neighborhood in D.C. where black culture is rapidly being erased. My only hope is that the largely homogeneous audience around me took every part of it home that I did and that the next time they pass by a young black local that they see a kid and nothing else. With that impact, this piece of art would reach its fullest potential.