Pipeline
Opening Night: July 10, 2017
Closing: August 27, 2017
Theater: Mitzi E. Newhouse
A mother’s hopes for her son clash with an educational system rigged against him in PIPELINE, the riveting new play by Dominique Morisseau (Skeleton Crew). Nya, an inner-city public high school teacher, is committed to her students but desperate to give her only son Omari opportunities they’ll never have. When a controversial incident at his upstate private school threatens to get him expelled, Nya must confront his rage and her own choices as a parent. But will she be able to reach him before a world beyond her control pulls him away?
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July 10, 2017
The teacher is trying to explain a poem to her class, but an echo keeps getting in the way. The echo, which reiterates words by Gwendolyn Brooks about young black men marking time on their way to an early grave, comes with a face, which only the teacher, named Nya, and the audience can see. This phantom has the voice and visage of a lanky teenager who is still very much alive, Nya’s son. And this ghostly, reproachful recitation of Brooks’s elegy to doomed youth shatters the composure of a woman for whom self-possession is as essential as oxygen. The words on the blackboard behind Nya magically erase themselves, and she finds herself sliding out of consciousness.
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