When was the last time you exited a theater in almost complete silence? This past weekend, following Antoinette Nwandu’s piercing Pass Over, 100 or so of my fellow audience members shuffled out of Lincoln Center Theater’s Claire Tow Theater in something of a daze. No one spoke in the elevator. One woman made a valiant but futile attempt to stop herself from crying.
“Golly gee/ did you guys hear/ a fella was killed today/ black fella/ another black fella was killed,” muses Mister (Matilda Tony winner Gabriel Ebert), in the tooth-achingly sweet tone of a liberal who’s corrupt and conservative at the core but still smiles and calls himself a liberal. (You know the type.) “Which is sad/ you know/ so sad.”
It’s easy for Mister to shrug off the sadness. It’s not so easy for the rest of us.
Nwandu’s three-actor, four-character drama centers on two young black men, Moses (Superior Donuts’ Jon Michael Hill) and Kitch (Namir Smallwood, who starred in Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline at LCT last year), living—or rather, trying not to die—on a ghetto street, where each day is a Waiting for Godot–esque cycle of struggle and stagnation. “You gittin up off dis block,” says Kitch. Echoes Moses: “We gittin up off dis block.” But every time they start to dream—envisioning a “promised land” stocked with collard greens and pinto beans, rows of clean socks, clean sheets, a woman with curves for days—something jolts them back to their harsh reality. Usually, it’s a visit from the not-so-friendly neighborhood police, here embodied by a single hateful cop character named Ossifer (Ebert again) who enjoys using his nightstick just a little too much. One day it’s the mysterious Mister, who loses his way, Little Red Riding Hood–style, basket in hand, while traveling to visit mother.
Though Ebert’s performance as a man with a bottomless picnic basket—Dim sum! Turkey legs! String beans?!?—is a kick, the scene plays like a setup for a remedial linguistics lesson: “Gosh/ you really like that word,” Mister says to Kitch. “The n-word.… I mean/ every sentence/ my n-word this/ my n-word that.” And yes, they do like the n-word. Undoubtedly, much will be made of how liberally Nwandu uses it throughout the play. After Pass Over’s 2017 premiere at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, one writer even managed to work it into a review. (You can imagine how that went over.)
But Nwandu is saying so much more. In one especially chilling passage, Moses asks how many of their friends have been killed by cops: “I’m askin my nigga/ how many.” Kitch resists answering, but eventually begins ticking off the undoubtedly incomplete list of blood-stained names:
ed from the otha night
darnell
fat jay
dat nigga roll wit jay
dumb terry
wall-eyed terry
wall-eye terry cousin
mike dat got dat messed up knee
big mike
junior
nick
jayvon
his brotha
i ain’t never know his name
c-money
julio
andre…
…justin
yo dat tall dude got dat elbow rash
day-shawn
day-kwan
dat nigga martin
kev
oh shit
dat otha kev
there’s more my nigga damn
i know they is
There’s a lot to unpack in the 90-minute Pass Over: slavery allusions, biblical overtones—both of which could use more consideration from director Danya Taymor (LCT3’s Queens). But you can also boil Nwandu’s drama down to three simple humane words: Stop killing us. It’s an appeal, a demand, and, sadly, a wish.
Pass Over opened June 18, 2018, and runs through July 15. Tickets and information: lct.org
