Best plays read in 2018: PIPELINE

Playwright Dominique Morisseau brings us home when mother & son take front and center:

 NYA: I will take a bullet for you. I will suffocate the sun for you. I will steal the sky for you. I will blind Moses for you. I will strip the wind and the rain and the forests for you. Before I let you die or rot or lose your freedom, I will surrender my own….Tell me how to save you….Because I have listened to everyone else. I’m ready to listen to you. Guide me…. … … … I’m going to sit here. And wait for instructions.

 Nya is raising her son Omari in the US culture that is so stacked against him that even the language his family uses overlooks that he is a teenage boy growing into a young man. The language is subtle, sometimes Omari points it out, and other times, among other characters, no one points it out. Objectifying Omari is so inherent in US culture that Nya calls the rage it elicits as his inheritance.

In a brief sentence, without giving away the story: Omari got in trouble in school and is at risk of going to jail. This is the pipeline Morisseau refers to.

For us mothers, the battlefield is here at home where we raise & protect & teach our children to love & enjoy life while they navigate this quagmire of weapons that they can’t see.

Pipeline shows this family (USA).

Sweat shows another (USA).

And The Ghosts of Lote Bravo shows another (Mexico).

In 2018, I’m so proud of Pittsburgh theaters for producing Sweat and Pipeline.

Maybe next year, one can produce The Ghosts of Lote Bravo – and continue broadening our horizon.

Pipeline.jpg

Best plays read in 2018

Sweat & The Ghosts of Lote Bravo

I pay no attention to NAFTA, as the world of economics is someone else’s specialty. However, these plays that share the same side of the same coin, yet exist across the border from one another, bring NAFTA down to the gritty real world. Sweat by Lynn Nottage steps into a bar in Reading, Pennsylvania right at the time the factory workers find out a good amount of the equipment was snuck out at night-time and moved across the border. Nottage’s play goes beyond “down-and-out factory workers”; her main characters, because they encompass both people of color and Caucasian, bring complexity into the story that has rarely been seen in mainstream news or on the Broadway stage. Add to the mix where middle-aged women and their teenage sons are front & center, we get a vibrant moment in life since all the front & center characters get to speak more than 100 words. My favorite line: “Sometimes I think we forget that we’re meant to pick up and go when the well runs dry: Our ancestors knew that.”

Hilary Bettis knows this in her play, The Ghosts of Lote Bravo. Her characters haven’t yet gotten comfortable; they’re still looking for the right well. They search near the border upon the arrival of the US factories called maquiladoras; but the maquiladoras offer far, far, far, far less than a livable wage in a community where control is gained by those who levy the most violence. I read that the play was written in order to shed some light on the hundreds of women who, over decades, have turned up murdered. This play shows a community of people striving to work in an environment that the production notes write, “The stench of sweat, shit, and decay is so constant that people no longer smell it.” Hundreds is numbing. So this play brings us into the private lives of one mother and her teenage daughter.

Favorite line: A virgin knows nothing about the sins a woman must endure for survival.

If I were a theater, and if I could get the rights, I would produce these plays in repertoire where the audience could see either one of these first, have dinner to sit quietly and let the feelings surface in all their mess, then see the other one.

The character I most want to see on stage: La Santa Muerte, the Saint of Monsters and Ghosts.