Pipeline at Soulpepper: Public’s Cool
Dahlia Katz
It’s nice to be back at Soulpepper. Their newest play, Pipeline, is a pretty standard drama, but it is fleshed out by the rigorous design and professional performances we’ve come to expect from the company.
Pipeline primarily takes place in a public school. It’s a six-person play, and three of those characters are staff at the school, including our “protagonist”, Nya (Akousa Amo-Adem).
Interestingly, the two high school students in the play don’t go to the public school — they go to a nearby private school. This includes Nya’s son, Omari (Tony Ofori), who, just before the play began, got his third behavioral “strike” at school because he assaulted a teacher who was tokenizing him in an English class by forcing him to tell the class about his experience of being Black. The whole thing was caught on video, and most of the play deals with the fallout of this event — Nya tries to stop him from going down the school-prison “pipeline”, and Omari struggles to get on the same wavelength as her and his father, Xavier (Kevin Hancahrd).
The play is well acted, and Amo-Adem navigates Nya’s arc tactfully — many of the scenes in Pipeline are long, but she keeps them moving forward nicely. Similarly, as Omari, Ofori skillfully navigates two scenes where he tells each of his parents an in-depth account of his English class altercation. Though, in a sense, Omari is doing the same thing in both these scenes, the different relationships he has with both of his parents are well-clarified, making the two scenes radically different.
As a director, Weyni Mengesha has an exciting voice — her transitions, especially, are thrillingly theatrical, with overhead lights and projections that reflect the characters’ psychologies. I did, however, find myself wishing for more theatricality throughout — compared to the transitions, the scenes felt rather polite and naturalistic; the only time they veered from their naturalism was when the text demanded it. This in itself is fine, and very normal within Canadian theatre, but since the transitions were so invigorating, I can’t help but feel it would’ve been more exciting to bring some of that theatricality to the rest of the scenes. At one point, Omari notes that “Words aren’t the medicine right now” — ironic, considering the production is so subservient to the text.
Of all the texts to be subservient to, however, this isn’t a bad one, and I find it particularly interesting how the play’s educational setting seeps into the other scenes — at one point Omari compares his girlfriend (?) to a “metamorphic rock”, invoking science class. This educational motif is reflected in the set, which, on a revolve, fluidy transforms from classroom to Nya’s home: the line between school and life is thin.
This exaltation of education (over imprisonment) could, in some scripts, end up offering undue praise to the flawed institutions that provide education — in this case, the public school. I don’t think that happens here, though, as the two other characters who work at Nya’s school — a teacher, Laurie (Kristen Thomson), and a security guard, Dun (Mazin Elsadig) — go through subplots that touch on the public school’s institutional faults.
So Pipeline is a solid enough return for Soulpepper, even if it is a little aesthetically safe.