Cleveland Play House’s ‘Pipeline’ connects emotionally, civically Bob Abelman Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal With poor, young African-American, Native American, and Latinx students being suspended and expelled from school more frequently than their middle-class white counterparts, often resulting in disenfranchisement and criminalization, it is little wonder that playwrights have been calling for social justice in their theater-making. Anna Deavere Smith’s trailblazing “Notes From the Field,” which appeared off-Broadway in 2016, offers a collection of open-wound monologues culled from interviews with actual first-responders. They include Sherrilyn Ifill, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who provides a sobering overview of what is being called the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and Rev. Jamal-Harrison Bryant, who spoke at the 2015 funeral of a young black man who died at the hands of Baltimore police officers. Dominique Morisseau has taken a different approach with “Pipeline,” which was first seen at New York City’s Lincoln Center in 2017 and is now in production by the Cleveland Play House under Steve H. Broadnax III’s direction. She provides an intense, didactic dramatization of an African-American family on the front line of the crisis. For more of this review, go to: www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/bob_abelman/