In its world premiere production at Steppenwolf Theatre Company last year, Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over earned Nwandu Chicago’s prestigious Jeff Award for new play, and caught the attention of Spike Lee, who filmed the work. But the play, now running at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater, also had its detractors—the most notorious being longtime Chicago Sun-Times critic Hedy Weiss, who by her own account was laid off after her review of Pass Over was met with outrage.
Weiss, who had written other controversial notices, drew particular ire for her claim that Nwandu’s play—in which two young black men are mocked and brutalized by two white men, one of the latter a police officer—offered a “wholly generic characterization of a racist white cop (clearly meant to indict all white cops),” and for the observation that “the lion’s share of the violence is perpetuated within the community itself,” meaning the African-American community. A petition was issued online encouraging Chicago theater companies to withhold comp tickets from Weiss, who was later accused of “deep-seated bigotry” in a statement issued by Steppenwolf’s artistic and executive directors. In an essay for American Theatre, Nwandu cited the review, which had also praised elements of Pass Over, as one of two especially “egregious responses” to the play, adding that Weiss’s career had been “peppered with tone-deaf, misguided and downright unethical comments.“
If that’s a lot of background to preface any actual commentary on Nwandu’s work, context is essential here, as it’s impossible to evaluate the current production of Pass Over without discussing either the righteous anger and sorrow that give the play its considerable power or the politically and creatively fraught climate it reflects. Inspired by the Book of Exodus and Waiting For Godot, Pass Over follows its African-American protagonists—named, tellingly, Moses and Kitch (respectively played here by Jon Michael Hill and Namir Smallwood, both excellent)—as Moses tries to lead his friend into a “Promised Land” beyond their oppressed circumstances. But they are continually thwarted by a menacing presence, one we don’t see at first, but become aware of when the actors periodically freeze, become silent and hold their hands up, looking terrified.
One source of their torment is embodied by “Ossifer,” a beast in uniform, a member of the same force that, as we learn early on, recently killed Moses’s brother. Ossifer is played with spectacular boorishness by Gabriel Ebert, who doubles as the play’s one other character: Mister, a cartoonish Caucasian who wanders in wearing a white suit and carrying a picnic basket, engaging the black men with hokey chitchat—“Gosh, golly, gee,” he keeps saying—and offering them food. Moses is wary, and with good reason; as Nwandu notes in her essay, “My play argues that while Ossifer’s overt aggression is pernicious, Mister’s complacent privilege is far more lethal.”
Privilege, that most pervasive of words in our current socio-cultural discouse, is key here. I trust fully that Nwandu’s intent was to show how it can sustain systemic prejudice—that Mister is not meant to represent an entire race, any more than Ossifer is meant to condemn all members of a profession. Nor does Nwandu suggest that police brutality is the only factor in Moses and Kitch’s desperate situation, or their moving camaraderie, which the actors depict with a physical vitality and grace that enhances the robust lyricism of Nwandu’s dialogue.
Pass Over is not, in fact, a naturalistic play; the bleak, bare-bones urban landscape designed by Wilson Chin could really be any desolate place from which there is no escape. The story, such as it is—like Beckett’s hobos, though for different reasons, Moses and Kitch aren’t doing anything or going anywhere—deftly ties an ancient mythical journey to a current social and spiritual crisis with deep roots in this country.
But while the protagonists emerge as potent symbols of enduring injustice, they’re ultimately less compelling as individuals. For all the tenderness, humor and anguish that Hill and Smallwood mine under Danya Taymor’s sensitive, animated direction, we get little sense of what drives their characters beyond pain and oppression. Moses enjoys a flash of triumph worthy of his name and ambition, then is brought down just as quickly and inexplicably; the song “Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’,” by Rodgers and Hammerstein—whose hit musicals decried racism as unabashedly as any popular entertainment of their era—is hummed or sung at different points to connote blithe bigotry.
If Pass Over makes a strong and necessary statement, it proves less conducive to starting a conversation—the kind in which opposing views and wrongheaded assumptions could be confronted and challenged. By making Moses and Kitch’s doom as inevitable and immutable as Mister’s ignorance and malice, Nwandu essentially rules out, or at least pushes aside, the possibility of progress. While this gifted young playwright may owe her critics nothing, one hopes she’ll give her characters more chances as she moves forward.
