Review: PIPELINE at Seattle Public Theater

Dear Readers, if you're familiar with Dominique Morisseau's play, "Pipeline", currently playing at Seattle Public Theater, you know what a striking play it is. Filled with resonant themes and high intensity moments, the show can knock you off your feet. But more than anything, it's about real people and real situations in our all too real, and all too troubled world. So, it needs to feel real. And while most in the SPT production were up to that task, there were some that I didn't feel the commitment to being real which took me out of the piece.

This riveting story centers on Nya (Dedra D. Woods), a black single mother and teacher in an inner-city school where she's doing her best to get these kids educated and keep them safe in a place where violence happens on a routine basis. But then there's her son, Omari (Tre Scott), whom she has tried to shelter from all this by sending him to the fancy private school upstate. A school where he's one of the few black students. But when Omari feels persecuted by one of his teachers and lashes out at him violently, suddenly Nya's world is upended as she's torn between her love for her son and her own experiences as a teacher.

Director Faith Bennett Russell does her best with a show that has so many locals and scene changes. Sometimes they bogged things down but more often than not, she and her stage crew were able to get things swiftly changed aided by some wonderful projections from Ahren Buhmann. But still, some of the pacing suffered from these changes. Beyond that, the tone and intensity of the show is mostly there but seemed to be hampered by that sense of realism, where people felt out of place or unbelievable. The most egregious I saw were a few of the supporting players, Hazel Rose Gibson as Omari's girlfriend, Jasmine, and Nikki Visel as a fellow teacher, Laurie. Both did an OK job but kept falling into the unbelievability trap especially when leaning into the more colloquial words and phrases such as "ain't" or "gonna" as they felt foreign coming from their mouths. They were reading Morisseau's words but not internalizing them, so they didn't feel natural.

This was not a problem for the two leads, however. Woods delivers a stirring performance as a woman trapped and losing all possibility for control or hope. And Scott wowed in the role of the student caught in the middle of the system, especially his monologues near the end where he left it all on the stage. And the two together, when their scenes were together, were a master class of connecting to others on stage. Especially when the two would delve into the poem by Gwendolyn Brooks', "We Real Cool", which is so integral to the story, the two would absolutely shine as they lost themselves in the words.

Morisseau's play is an absolute winner and tells a crucial bit about our society today. I just wish everyone had been able to get a feel for the characters and the words beyond the page. And so, with my three-letter rating system, I give Seattle Public Theater's production of "Pipeline" a MEH+. You can have the best script in the world but if your audience keeps getting taken out of the world of that script, then you lose the stakes of that world.

"Pipeline" performs at Seattle Public Theater through April 3rd. For tickets or information visit them online at www.seattlepublictheater.org.

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