In his 1903 essay “Of the Meaning of Progress,” writer W. E. B. Du Bois recalls his experiences as a schoolteacher in rural Tennessee, drawing a sharp distinction between two types of Black students. Those who remembered slavery from their childhoods struggled with the world, and “sank into listless indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado.” Students who didn’t have those memories were eager to succeed, and Du Bois writes “their weak wings beat against their barriers,—barriers of caste, of youth, of life…” You can tell which group Du Bois sees as the “progress” of Black America.
More than a century later, this country still divides Black students into bad and good categories. But contemporary writers are blurring these boundaries, rejecting Du Bois’ goal of racial uplift — the fantasy that Black Americans will gain equality by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and being successful.
Case in point: Dave Harris’ Exception to the Rule, now showing at DC’s Studio Theatre through October 27. In a harrowing 80 minutes, Harris dramatizes how racial uplift can be just another system under which all Black teens become trapped. And unlike Du Bois, Harris looks at struggling students with affection, not condescension. He dares us to enjoy the “reckless bravado” of teenagers who don’t embody Black excellence.
The show takes place in a sterile classroom — Tony Cisek’s set features bare cinder-block walls with high windows, the only bright color being a tiny American flag in the corner. Over an intercom, a voice (Craig Wallace) lets us know the high school is ranking near last in its city for standardized tests. The voice also ominously warns that the school is closing for the weekend.
Soon students start arriving for detention, walking in with ease and familiarity. They’re a ragtag crew of familiar types. Mikayla (Khalia Muhammad) is the confident girl with an unintentionally grating voice; Tommy (Steven Taylor Jr.) is the slightly nerdy kid trying to be cool; Dayrin (Jacques Jean-Mary) is the smooth talker with fuckboy energy; Dasani (Shana Lee Hill) is the warm girl trying to mind her own business; Abdul (Khouri St.Surin) is the resentful guy prone to fights.
The final person to enter detention is Erika (Sabrina Lynne Sawyer), much to the shock of her classmates. Erika is the goody-two-shoes, the one student deemed “college-bound” by the community. She’s confident in her smarts, but is mostly just disturbed by her classmates, who seem to embody all of the harmful inner-city stereotypes she’s trying to transcend: they’re loud and obnoxious and mean and unbothered. “I thought detention was quiet,” Erika states. “A place where everyone remembers the mistakes that got them here and then learns how to not make the same mistakes again.” The other kids immediately burst into laughter. They know where they are, and they have little reason to believe in their own redemption.
The bottle-episode premise for Exception to the Rule allows for escalating dramas and chill hangouts. The whole show follows suit, becoming a study in contrasts: rule followers vs. rule breakers, assimilation vs. defiance, escaping home vs. staying home. What’s significant is what’s not staged. There are no white authority figures to rail against. Nor are there Black mother surrogates (à la Sister Mary Clarence or Mary Lamb) to step in and set these “troubled teens” on “the right path.” The teens are left to their own devices, and still end up reinforcing the damage of the world onto each other.
Director Miranda Haymon (who also directed the play’s 2022 off-Broadway debut at Roundabout Theatre Company) does an excellent job balancing the show’s allegorical touches with high school mundanity. We sense that as much as these characters are familiar types, they’re also performing these roles to impress each other. Khalia Muhammad is particularly good at bending her voice and physicality to ingratiating effect.
Despite these exaggerations, there’s immense loneliness. The stage has an archipelago of desks, where marooned characters pass time to survive. Haymon lets the actors apply lip gloss, comb hair, listen to music, read books, and play games. The action is engrossing — so much so that it steals focus from speaking characters. I wondered if the show would benefit from having less dialogue (and plot) to get through.
Still, dialogue is the primary tool Harris uses to build provocations around identity. The ensemble of Exception to the Rule delivers many monologues, skillfully blending cruelty with entertainment. The real showcase is for Sabrina Lynne Sawyer’s Erika, whose awkwardness transforms into ferocity. Sawyer delivers a torrent of speeches revealing the burden of exceptionality, her own superiority complex, and the terrifying ways she’s placed her Blackness and sexuality as incommensurable with her personhood.
The rest of the production doesn’t land with the impact of Erika’s words. The references to aspirational Black celebrities feel more attuned to millennials than to Gen Z. And I was curious whether my tiredness watching the show was because of sometimes sluggish pacing, or if my body was reacting to the setting’s brutality.
I also question if the show’s making points some audiences of color already understand. In some ways, it’s easy now to critique Du Bois’ racial uplift. The post-Obama world is proof that “Black faces in high places” don’t help most Americans. And just ask anyone who’s gone through “gifted and talented” education programs — they’ll tell you it’s an isolating and dangerous game, to tell kids they’re better than their own neighbors, families, and friends.
Yet with this show, Harris pushes beyond a critique of racial uplift, into a celebration of the Black culture that’s typically derided. Harris once described Exception to the Rule as “kind of a hood-ass play,” and the show delights in bawdiness and lewdness. The audience I saw the show with was mostly white with a few people of color (including myself) sprinkled in. There seemed to be a hesitation among us on how to enjoy the show. Were we allowed to laugh at this?
I found the audience’s attitude frustrating. Politeness is the enemy of both comedy and drama, and politeness clipped laughter at ridiculously funny lines. In some ways, the audience’s paranoid politeness was just another way that characters onstage were being policed into certain “acceptable” behavior. I wish we allowed ourselves to enjoy the play without hesitation. Harris understands there’s nothing wrong with people — or a show — being “hood.”
After watching Exception to the Rule I’m still left asking, “Why don’t the characters just leave?” The students keep waiting for the teacher Mr. Bernie, who, similar to Godot, remains elusive to the point of absurdity. But the characters seem resigned to their metaphorical (and literal) cage. Without staging it too explicitly, Haymon and Harris’ classroom flickers with the surreal. Like Get Out’s sunken place or I Saw the TV Glow’s midnight realm, it’s a dissociative, adolescent purgatory.
I’m reminded, strangely, of the closing of that 1903 Du Bois essay. He returns to Tennessee to discover that the divide between the “good” and “bad” Black students didn’t matter: all his students never escaped generational poverty, and promising students died at a young age. “How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real!” Du Bois writes. “And all this life and love and strife and failure,—is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?”
There’s a way of reading Du Bois’ words as a call to action: we must push forward into the sunlight, achieve more, and make progress a reality. But with Exception to the Rule, Harris lets us linger in a delirious paralysis between day and night, past and future, disgust and aspiration. Harris doesn’t cast judgment on those who can’t leave that space. It’s similar to the end of Exception to the Rule, when the classroom becomes truly quiet. It’s what Erika always wanted, but within that silence, there’s unheard agony.
Running Time: Approximately 80 minutes with no intermission.
Exception to the Rule plays through October 27, 2024, in the Mead Theatre at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th Street NW, Washington, DC. For tickets ($42–$93, with low-cost options and discounts available), go online or call the box office at 202-332-3300.
The program for Exception to the Rule is online here.
COVID Safety: All performances are mask recommended. Studio Theatre’s complete Health and Safety protocols are here.