Black mothers in America have the world on their shoulders. They carry the burden of living in a world that devalues their skin, hair, and often, their very existence. They send their children out into the world and fear they might not return (I know this because my own mother tells me so). Their sons, young black men, face violence and racism at school—a place that is supposed to nurture them—and even their teachers and school administrators can treat them like criminals.

But what if, as a black mother, you’re also a teacher? That is the dichotomy at play in Studio Theatre’s Pipeline, a vivid drama that acutely breaks down the school-to-prison pipeline in which schools funnel the most vulnerable students into the criminal justice system with “zero-tolerance” policies and officers patrolling the hallways. Nya (Andrea Harris Smith) is the anxious single mother of Omari (Justin Weaks) and is haunted by that system when Omari faces severe discipline after he gets involved in a school incident that everyone tries to get to the bottom of.

Even at Omari’s glitzy prep school, far from the hood where he grew up and his mother teaches, a student of color isn’t automatically saved. As Nya cries out at one point, sending your black son into the world every day “is a gamble.”

The bleak reality of the perils that face today’s students and teachers sets in before we even meet Nya and Omari. Just seconds after the lights go down and the audience’s chatter subsides, real-life smartphone footage of brutal school fights flashes on screens across the stage. This isn’t the comfortable theater anymore, but rather the bloodstained hallways of an under-resourced city school in which Nya and her colleagues have breakroom debates about how much heavy-handed discipline is appropriate for students whose classroom brawls make for viral videos.

Intentionally set in an unspecified urban location, Pipeline comes from the mind of MacArthur “genius” Dominique Morisseau, who was raised by a Detroit public schools teacher and was herself an educator. The dramatist draws on her classroom experience to paint every character in a sympathetic light. Among the teachers, students, school resource officers, love interests, and parents (even Omari’s ice-cold father, Xavier, played by Bjorn DuPatay), it’s hard to know who the protagonist is here—you want to root for them all.

It quickly becomes apparent, however, that no matter who you root for, it’s the young men of color who lose in this broken education system that targets them as “animals,” as Omari’s situation makes clear. That point is only driven deeper into the soul as Nya teaches an English lesson on  Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool,” a poem about students who skip school to have sex, shoot pool, drink, and, tragically, “die soon.”

Pipeline‘s material is heavily influenced by Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow (which, along with the play’s script, are for sale in Studio’s cafe). But amid the suffocating reality that the Awoye Timpo-directed production brings to light, there are moments that give the audience room to breathe. Omari’s girlfriend Jasmine (deftly played by Monica Rae Summers Gonzalez) explores the complexities of teenagehood and young love, telling Omari in a voicemail, “Every relationship deserves to go through all the colors of the rainbow—that’s how you know you had something.”

It isn’t long before the audience realizes that the play has been a classroom the whole time; that we’ve spent a 90-minute school period listening to the plight of a young black mother and son. And perhaps, if we’ve been listening closely, we can lighten the burden they carry.

Pipeline runs at Studio Theatre through Feb. 16 23. Tickets $20-$104. Runtime approximately one hour and 35 minutes with no intermission.