Pipeline by Dominique Morisseau

I love literary allusions that I understand. They make me feel so well-cultured. And, no doubt, they make the playwright feel well-cultured employing them. And who doesn't love Gwendolyn Brooks' We Real Cool in all it's musicality and concision? However, as poignant as it may be to stutter and hesitate to pronounce the last line of that poem (“We die soon”), here it is more self-consciously artsy than relevant to the play. The high school student, Omari, is anything but a cool cat indulging himself with no concern for consequences. The literary parallel that makes much more sense, but which only Omari himself brings up, is Bigger Thomas from Native Son, a man defined by anger that he cannot restrain. While I do not particularly like the novel (I am not a fan of watching people dig themselves into progressively deeper holes), it seems like a more deeply drawn investigation of that parallel would serve to give more insight and substance to the play than the repetitions of We Real Cool as some kind of psychic bond between mother and son.