“When I started writing Exception to the Rule I had to stand face to face with the idea of what being ‘successful’ is and reckon with the fact that I had left lots of things behind and also inherited a sort of condescension towards where I came from. In Exception, each of those characters is wrestling with what it means to stay behind and what it means to go ‘forward,’ whatever that means.” —Dave Harris
Dave Harris started the play that would become Exception to the Rule in 2014 in his junior year at Yale University. It was a turning point in his writing—he’d been a playwright and performance poet in high school, but was majoring in Cognitive Science, with a plan to keep up writing as a hobby. He was in a playwriting course and his instructor, playwright and performance artist Deb Margolin said something he’d credit with changing his major and his life. “She kind of slapped me upside the head and said, ‘Dave, why are you scared of yourself?’” he remembers. “I planned to go to college and be a scientist, make a lot of money, and never be poor again; I made it to college and thought that meant I was successful, until I realized everything I thought was true was a lie. My family had worked their lives trying to get me into a privileged space like this, and yet the success I was working for was not based in fulfillment, but in fear.”
Margolin’s question—and Harris’s complicated response to why he wasn’t taking his writing more seriously—led to the first draft of Exception to the Rule. “I was questioning what it meant to be successful, and what it meant to leave where I grew up in West Philly to come to Yale. Everyone I knew told me, ‘You’re going to go off and find something better,’ and then I got to Yale and realized that it had just as many problems as everywhere else.”
In beginning to unpick what Harris characterizes as the internalized racism he learned from attending middle and high school at an almost entirely white elite prep school in the Philadelphia Main Line while living in a primarily Black neighborhood in West Philadelphia, Harris created a set of teenagers full of their own assumptions, contradictions, and ways of moving through the world.
It's the Friday before MLK Day, and five detention regulars—so-called “bad girl” Mikayla, class clown Tommy, live-wire Dayrin, caretaking Dasani, and notably quiet Abdul—are waiting out their time when the high school’s star student Erika walks in. It’s her first detention, and they lay out the rules: You stay in the room until Mr. Bernie comes. When he comes, he’ll sign your slip and you can leave. But Mr. Bernie hasn’t shown up, so the teens flirt, beef, tease each other, and most of all: They wait.
Dayrin
It’s fucked up. We can’t do anything until he gets here. And we can’t do anything to get him here.
While her detention-mates seem resigned to this impossible situation, Erika has only ever known rules that have launched her ahead—to the top of the class and out of this school system into one made for achievers. So when Erika challenges her classmates to stand up for themselves, they remind her how little she knows about how the school actually works for everyone else. As the stakes of staying or planning to leave intensify, each of Harris’s characters find themselves confronting the expectations they have for themselves and in systems that seem built to fail them.