Exception to the Rule

Exception to the Rule, written by Dave Harris and directed by Miranda Haymon, can be a difficult play to listen to and watch, but it is worth it. You are told it is about “Six Black students at the city’s worst high school wait out Friday detention, but no one can figure out how “College Bound Erika” ended up stuck here too. The rules are simple: a teacher has to sign their form before anyone can leave the room. But no adults have made it yet, so the teens fill their time by flirting, fighting, and forming plans for the long weekend ahead—until a more sinister probability comes into view. This gut-punch of a comedy interrogates how a radicalized public school system fails its students by design, who gets the chance to escape it, and what they must leave behind to do so.”

Sitting in the theater I was sure I was seeing and hearing it very differently from the Black woman who was sitting in the same row. As the play, which takes place in a very plain schoolroom went on, and I listened to the high school students talk to each other, it brought me back to my time as a teacher in Harlem, where I taught for three years. Though I had younger students, I never taught a Caucasian student. I kept picturing the kids in my classroom and thinking which ones of them would grow up to be like the characters in this play. Who would be the loud Mikayla, who was going to be Dayrin, acting up all the time, who would be Abdul, the boy who was the deeper thinker, and who would end up being Erika, the college bound member of the class. I wondered if it was racism, or reality, that I didn’t think that all those kids I taught were going to be Erikas. And it was clear this play wasn’t simply about a racialized school system, but also a racialized society. Where kids saw themselves as stuck not only in detention, but in life. How they saw Erika finally leave detention, and told her she would never look back or remember them. That she was ‘whitey’ because she cared about her studies, and about being good. I had heard that term used in schools forty years ago, and it was kind of frightening that it still is what the playwright tells me is going on today. 

Image

So, I had one lens to see this play through, but I wonder what lenses others see it through, and how it makes them feel. I walked out feeling so sad for the kids who seemed to see no way out. Thinking how their life at home must add to that, not just school. I have seen in politics how there is not only White on Black racism, but how there is Black on Black racism. We see it today in how some Blacks think Kamala Harris may not be Black enough to call herself Black. Even someone like Janet Jackson, even though she has now apologized for it, question her Blackness. We see how Donald Trump uses that racist trope in his campaign against her. 

So, if you sit through 80 minutes of Exception to the Rule, and I urge you to do so, be prepared to feel at least a little uncomfortable as you leave the theater and think about what you saw and heard.

The cast is uniformly superb, so I won’t single out any one. They all have you believing they are students in a high school. They each bring you into their individual lives both through their spoken words, their humor, and physicality. They are MIKAYLA, Khalia Muhammad; TOMMY, Steven Taylor Jr.; DAYRIN Jacques Jean-Mary; DASANI, Shana Lee Hill; ABDUL, Khouri St.Surin; and ERIKA, Sabrina Lynne Sawyer. 

The creative team includes the voice on the intercom, Craig Wallace; set designer, Tony Cisek; costume designer, Brandee Mathies; lighting designer, Emma Deane; and sound designer, Kathy Ruvuna.

Exception to the Rule will be at Studio Theatre until October 27th and tickets are available online.