Two black men who want to be known as — well — just that; a (potentially) well-meaning but clueless white guy whose feet hurt—“weak arches”—and a bigoted cop. What happens when they all come together? They create a loaded situation delivering heart-brake that is, occasionally at least, punctured with hilarity.
Who is “po-po”? How come you can say the “N-word” and I can’t? Why dream big but, then again, why not? Let’s talk and walk like a white man and see what happens.
This is what Pass Over, a play by Antoinette Nwandu, delivered to a D.C. audience earlier this month. The play unfolds on an evocative but bare set made of concrete and just one lamppost. Soft teddy bears are tied to it, memorializing the final moments of a fallen brother. On the concrete, two young black men waste away as time passes them by, evoking the endless hope of deliverance in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, one of Nwandu’s inspirations. Named Moses and Kitch, the two exchange N-word-laden banter and dream about passing over to a place beyond the grey steel and concrete that both defines and confines their lives. On the lookout for the American Dream before America’s deadly over-policing of black communities turns it into a nightmare, the duo aim to “self-actualize;” to arrive someplace that offers “champagne and caviar.” Someplace like “the promised land,” Moses says. But when a basket full of gourmet food arrives on the arms of a lost and beguiling white man in a hat—a man prone to saying “gosh, golly, gee”—the duo resist his generosity despite the delicious aromas. All this for good reason, as things turn out.
The play debuted in June, 2017, at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre before it arrived in New York. In 2018, Spike Lee swooped in to film a performance which is now available on Amazon Prime. (Full Disclosure: On the day Nwandu received the call from Spike Lee, I happened to be with her at the MacDowell Colony for Artists, where Nwandu was a fellow working on another creation and sleeping in the same cabin where James Baldwin once slept. After the call, Nwandu joined me and other fellows at the communal dinner as she tried to digest the good news.)
Good reviews continued. The New York Times called it a “Searing Pass Over” and the Chicago Tribune lauded Nwandu for the “vivid humanity” with which she paints her two main characters.
The play also stirred controversy when one theatre critic, Hedy Weiss of the Chicago Sun-Times, derided the depiction of the white cop as brutally racist (or brutal and racist), calling into question a somewhat cliched what-about-ism, as in: What about black on black violence?
Nwandu doesn’t ignore black on black violence. When Moses and Kitch feel they’ve run out of options on their derelict tiny corner of the world, violence against each other’s bodies presents itself as one way of escaping; one way of passing over. But in this Nwandu shows black on black violence as a symptom of, rather than a reason for, police brutality toward the black community.
The play depicts a specific condition of being black in America today: The targeting of black bodies by over-militarized tactics and, too often, shamelessly indiscriminate and unapologetic deadly force. In doing so, Pass Over explores the inherent limitations of liberalism within power; the white man whose name is “Master” and his fleeting confusion at his own sense of entitlement. It depicts the tense friction points between oppression and submission in a modern democracy; the self-deprecation of those who have grown so tired of resisting yet continue to do it, for such is the nature of the human spirit and its unbending quest for liberty.
If Pass Over comes to a theatre near you, go see it.