In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a webcast of the Lincoln Center Theater premiere of Dominique Morriseau’s Pipeline. Here’s an excerpt.
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If you’re looking for streaming theater webcasts and are prepared to pay the tab, BroadwayHD, a subscription-based digital platform launched five years ago, has more than 300 shows to offer. Many are British productions, but a fair number of the plays and musicals are of American origin (though some are West End transfers of Broadway shows). Several of BroadwayHD’s most noteworthy offerings were taped by PBS and telecast as episodes of its “Great Performances” and “Live at Lincoln Center” series, and one of the latter, Lincoln Center Theater’s premiere production of Dominique Morriseau’s “Pipeline,” is a major event.
Performed by LCT in 2017, “Pipeline” has since been taken up by regional theaters from coast to coast. Part of the reason for its ubiquity is its preternaturally timely subject matter: “Pipeline” is the story of Nya and Xavier (Karen Pittman and Morocco Omari), a divorced middle-class black couple whose teenage son, Omari (Namir Smallwood), attacks one of his schoolteachers and is at risk of going to jail as the curtain goes up. But Ms. Morriseau is no mere headline-grabber, and “Pipeline” is an exceptionally well-crafted play that pulls you in by working the miracle of theater, which has the power to take you to places you’ve never been, showing you how other people live—and how they feel about their lives….
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Read the whole thing here.The trailer for Pipeline:
