Something is not quite right with the intercom in the inner-city classroom that’s the setting for Dave Harris’s new play, Exception to the Rule. The device seems to be working fine at first, but as a bunch of high school students linger in detention, waiting for a teacher who will never arrive, mysterious static begins obscuring any references to the time of day in periodic announcements, so that the kids—who don’t have access to wifi—lose track of how long they’ve been there, or when they’re getting out. The voice on the speaker is crystal clear, in contrast, when it warns ominously of “consequences” for those who don’t follow the rules.
This Kafka-meets-Waiting for Godot-meets-No Exit setup would seem a natural progression for Harris, a rising playwright and poet who made his New York theater debut earlier this year with Tambo & Bones, which focused on two fellows trapped in a minstrel show. Like the titular characters in that play, the teenagers in Exception are all Black, and they belong to a category Harris identifies in his stage directions as “Street Kids”—youngsters who “venture away from the insides of their home,” and “become immersed in the world that they are necessarily a part of.”
All but one, that is: Erika, clearly the exception referred to in the play’s title, is also Black, but she’s a “Porch Kid.” “The Porch Kids never leave their porch,” Harris writes, presumably not being literal. “As such, they are shielded from most of what goes on around them, though they see it.” Read those two definitions again, because they’ll prepare you for both the dramatic promise and the specious elements of this engaging but ultimately frustrating play.
Directed with sensitivity and vigor by Miranda Haymon, the world premiere production of Exception casts six charismatic young actors as the students, all of them—except Erika, of course—regulars in detention. Although their most recent transgressions are not all fully detailed, it soon emerges that school policy is structured so that anyone who receives this penalty essentially can’t avoid having to serve time again and again.
As the sole newbie, Erika becomes increasingly horrified by what she learns of the others’ experiences both in and outside of school. Mikayla, a feisty, flirty beauty played with wry charm by Amandla Jahava, started making her own clothes to avoid having to wear hand-me-downs, and wound up being ogled and publicly humiliated by a male teacher. Tommy, a loose-limbed sweetheart in Malik Childs’s winning performance, literally heard a close family member being shot to death.
Erika, though, remains a mystery. The others make fun of her high grades and impressive vocabulary, and actress Mayaa Boateng credibly evinces the mix of practiced poise and awkwardness that might distinguish such a fish in unfamiliar waters. But what is Erika’s story, really? We learn that she used to suffer panic attacks, and eventually the reason she’s been detained with the rest of them, but not much else. What are her own circumstances at home, and her place in the school’s social ecosystem? How have these factors contributed to her drive and her academic success?
In other words, how and why has Erika avoided the land mines that, this play seems to suggest, have destined the Street Kids to failure? What advantages have made it unnecessary, to follow Harris’s logic, to immerse herself in the world that the others necessarily belong to? Or are we meant to believe that, as a young Black woman, she is simply fooling herself by thinking that she could ever be an equal player on a wider field? That, as a monologue describing the act that got her punished seems to imply, there’s an element of denial or even self-loathing in her aspiration?
I wouldn’t presume to answer these last two questions for the playwright, but suffice it to say that I found the last fifteen or twenty minutes of Exception to the Rule as disheartening as they are sobering. Certainly, Erika and the other characters in this play face obstacles that many of us could never dream of, and Harris has written a thoughtful—and entertaining—testament to them. Still, I would have preferred to leave the theater with a little more fodder for hope.
