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About midway through the first act of “Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education” – Anna Deavere Smith’s emotionally stunning, outrage-inspiring but ultimately hopeful one-woman theatrical performance on the devastating societal effects of the school-to-prison pipeline – I found myself wondering how an audience that was not primarily composed of “serious” theatergoers (in Cambridge, no less) would have received the impactful material.

From the classrooms to the streets, from the glorious memories of Selma to shocking cellphone video that captures a school officer tossing a student around a classroom, here’s the raw stuff of actual and urgent crisis.

Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education is so much more than a “One Woman Show.” 

The overall effect of this play is stunning and deeply moving – moving one to tears at an emotional level and moving each individual to want to find a way to make a difference.

Marshalling her considerable creative forces and once again singlehandedly conjuring a wildly diverse array of characters, Anna Deavere Smith schools us from the front lines of education vs.race in these not yet United States.

Theater needs an audience to fulfill its mission, to engage with the entertainment being produced on the stage.

The show features 10 of Nigeria’s top actresses performing monologues and songs that address the trials the country’s women endure.

There are so many forces at work in this awful story: political, social, religious, certainly misogyny. But Nigerian playwright Ifeoma Fafunwa says that if the world is to make an honest reckoning of how and why women are oppressed, women must ask themselves, “What’s my responsibility? What did I do to create this world?”