Six spectacular actors bring deeply moving performances under director Cheryl Lynn Bruce in Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline.

The capacity crowd who braved six-degree weather to show up at the Biograph Theatre on Lincoln Ave. were richly rewarded by this exceptional production. But you kind of have to go when a Morisseau premiere beckons. I for one am invested in her work now, having been wowed by two of her three Detroit cycle plays - Skeleton Crew at Skokie's Northlight Theatre last year and Paradise Blue at the tiny TimeLine Theatre on Wellington the year prior. (Just by coincidence, Morisseau's 2017 play, now having its Chicago premiere, was also broadcast nationally by PBS last night from another ongoing production - the one at Lincoln Center in New York.)

Pipeline is lauded for its topicality around the current issue of young black males too easily at risk of entering a pipeline to jail. And it also touches on the merits of inner-city public community schools versus private education.

But perhaps even more powerfully, it highlights the debilitating effects of our society's racism-based social dysfunction. In Pipeline this adverse miasma infiltrates the emotional lives of the middle class parents of a teenage boy, Omari (a kinetic performance by Matthew Elam). A slight, sensitive poetic youth who seems an unlikely candidate to become a thug, Omari gets into trouble after inexplicably assaulting his high school English teacher.

Pipeline also showcases Morisseau’s prowess for examining the inner lives of interesting personalities, the forces that energize them as people, all against the contemporary societal backdrop. In Pipeline there is a specificity to these characters – six fully-formed individuals, no tropes or archetypes.

You will be touched by these exceptional people, and by the compelling performances that bring them to life. When the play opens on a sparse stage, Omari's mother Nya (Tyla Abercrumbie – who is devastatingly good), a public high school teacher, is leaving a voice message for her ex, and Omari's dad, Xavier (Mark Spates Smith), detailing their son’s predicament: that he may be expelled from his private school and possibly be charged criminally with assault.  

Nya leaves a lengthy voice mail in which her language stumbles and runs aground – a sets a tone for the remainder of the 90-minute show. Repeating and rephrasing that 60-second message, Nya shows her inner self and internal conflicts. The scene cues the audience to listen to the language for the rest of the show, for it will communicate on multiple levels.

Pipeline is also literary, revisiting at several points Gwendolyn Brooks in a poetic remix of We Real Cool – the 24-word masterpiece the perfectly captures a cry of lost youth: 

We Real Cool

THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL. 
We real cool. We
Left school. We 
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We 
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon. 

Courtesy The Poetry Foundation

The event that triggered Omari’s rage was also literary: a classroom discussion in which his teacher over-aggressively called on him to discuss Richard Wright’s Native Son character, Bigger Thomas. “He was asking me in that room, in that way,” Omari tells his mother, his language suggesting that as an African-American, he is a rarity in his class. “I don’t want to be the token respondent.”

And in fact, as Omari later tells his father about the incident, he says he was feeling upset that his dad sent him financial support like clockwork, but never delivered his love. “Guys say they want their dad, but it’s overrated,” Omari says. The child support he gets from him “does the biology, but it doesn’t do the soul.”

This is a play for actors, because Morisseau gives each of the characters a show-stopping soliloquy, or ranting digression. You’ll want to stand up and cheer for Security Guard Dun (Ronald L. Conner) in “I Do My Job,” weep after Omari’s double-barreled unloading to his dad Xavier. Or laugh and applaud, for Aurora Real De Asua’s Jasmine – Omari’s girlfriend; and Janet Ulrichs Brooks as the teacher, Laurie - both of whom provide measured lightheartedness to the show. 

This production of Pipeline runs through March 1 at the Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago. It’s highly recommended that you don’t miss it.