A half dozen empty desks sit beneath the funereal aura of fluorescent lights. A shrieking bell signals the end of the school day while a muffled intercom announcement reminds students to gather their bus passes, remember to exit through the rear of the building (thanks to newly installed metal detectors at the front entrance), and, most importantly, “have a safe weekend.” It’s the Friday before a long weekend—MLK Day to be exact—and this is the “worst” high school in the city.

Studio Theatre’s Exception to the Rule opens on Room 111, the site of after-school detention and a claustrophobic vacuum designed by Tony Cisek. Directed by Miranda Haymon, the circumstances of Dave Harris’ 2023 play are deceptively simple. Six Black students are in detention for various reasons gradually to be discovered over the course of the play. But the story reveals a more sinister conceit when faculty supervision never arrives, time begins to lose meaning, and an unknowable threat (what the characters only refer to as “consequences”) awaits anyone who exits Room 111 without permission.

First to enter are Tommy (Steven Taylor Jr.) and Mikayla (Khalia Muhammad), whose flirtatious power game quickly garners contention over Mikayla’s sexual history. They are interrupted by the arrival of three others, the ever-upbeat Dasani (Shana Lee Hill), Mikayla’s ex Dayrin (Jacques Jean-Mary), and lone wolf Abdul (Khouri St.Surin). The students engage in sometimes playful, sometimes cruel banter, but quickly turn their heads to gawk at “first-timer” Erika (Sabrina Lynne Sawyer), whose reputation for overachieving masks a far deeper set of insecurities. As if trapped in a Pandora’s box, these characters oscillate between tension and hope, but relief (like the absentee detention monitor Mr. Bernie) never arrives. 

Exception to the Rule shares qualities with Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline (produced at Studio in 2019), and Harris seems as inspired by the work of Jordan Peele as he is by the French absurdist Jean-Paul Sartre. As comparisons go, however, Exception to the Rule is not The Breakfast Club. Unlike its all-White counterpart, the notable absence of a coming-of-age narrative only serves to amplify the play’s implicit fatalism, packing a series of gut punches when we most desire salvation for these characters. 

Costume designer Brandee Mathies leans in to Harris’ fascination with stereotypes, while at the same time shedding light on the personal and social lives of these students. For instance, Mikayla wears an out-of-place peasant skirt, a symbol of her objectification via the school’s arbitrary dress code. Erika clings tightly to her slim-fitting cardigan, only to shed her layers later on as if shedding a layer of skin itself. Sound designer Kathy Ruvuna warps the voice of the intercom—the play’s sole adult and only authority figure—to amplify Harris’ themes of miscommunication and absence. Like a broken record, the once-live intercom (voiced by Craig Wallace) shifts to a haunted automation. 

Each character has at least one extended monologue: Dasani’s delirious reinterpretation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech; Tommy’s post-traumatic recollection of gun violence, and Erika’s impassioned admittance of the act that earned her detention. The cast truly excels when reading between the lines of their characters’ dialog. Hill ever so slightly crumbles when Dasani is accused of stealing food from the cafeteria; Jean-Mary and St.Surin’s characters earn detention for fighting, but neither Dayrin nor Abdul can truly articulate why. And, finally, when asked about whether she expects Mr. Bernie to arrive sometime before dawn, audiences look hopefully to Muhammad’s Mikayla only to hear her absent-minded “maybe” quickly become a firm “no.” 

Thinking outside the classroom walls, Exception to the Rule is about Black high school students navigating the impenetrable realities of the “school-to-prison pipeline”—finding kinship in their disobedience, losing hope in their authority figures (and adults), and wondering how even “college-bound Erika” could fall victim to this meritocracy. From his meta-examination of minstrelsy in the award-winning Tambo & Bones to last year’s video game-inspired production of Incendiary at Woolly Mammoth, Harris has a fondness for semi-impossible circumstances, locating apt metaphors for racial identity in a mediatized understanding of ordinary life. Studio’s latest production of Harris’ work is no exception to the rule. 

Exception to the Rule, written by Dave Harris and directed by Miranda Haymon, plays at Studio Theatre through Oct. 27. studiotheatre.org. $38–$92.