• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • About
  • Donate

The Arts Fuse

Boston's Online Arts Magazine: Dance, Film, Literature, Music, Theater, and more

  • Podcasts
  • Coming Attractions
  • Reviews
  • Short Fuses
  • Interviews
  • Commentary
  • The Arts
    • Performing Arts
      • Dance
      • Music
      • Theater
    • Other
      • Books
      • Film
      • Food
      • Television
      • Visual Arts
You are here: Home / Featured / Theater Review: “Pass Over” — An Unforgiving World

Theater Review: “Pass Over” — An Unforgiving World

January 19, 2020 Leave a Comment

By Robert Israel

If one of the aims of art is to create a distinctively imaginative world, than Pass Over succeeds in generating a landscape of devastation, a hopeless place filled with gaping wounds and visible scars.

Pass Over by Antoinette Nwandu. Directed by Monica White Ndounou. A co-production of the Front Porch Arts Collective and SpeakEasy Stage Company at the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont St. Boston, MA, through February 2.

Lewis D. Wheeler, Kadahj Bennett, and Hubens “Bobby” Cius in the SpeakEasy Stage production of Pass Over. Photo: Nile Scott Studios.

Be forewarned — you may be physically accosted as you make your way to your seat at the Calderwood Pavilion. Audience members sit on four sides of the open performance space: a bare stage with plywood platforms, a lamppost, and a steel column that could be identified as a whipping post. This one-act play begins as soon as the actors enter and begin warming up. They get into the rhythm of the evening in a peculiar fashion (arms flailing and akimbo, torsos writhing, the duo appear to be playing a silly game with their bare palms). They seem to be in a mischievous mood and, because we must thread across their turf to sit down, the twosome will get in your face. That’s a guarantee. But when you finally get to your seat, don’t delude yourself into believing you’re home free. Wait until the lights dim. This play takes no prisoners. Even in its quiet moments – and there are a few – it’s like venturing to survey the wreckage with the arrival of the eye of a storm. The calm will only last a moment — the maelstrom will return.

Playwright Antoinette Nwandu tells us that Pass Over is set “now/right now/but also 1855/but also 13th century BCE.” She says that the location is: “a ghetto street, a lamppost/night/but also a plantation/but also Egypt, a city built by slaves.” That is another way of saying she takes a long historical look at racism in America. No wonder that director Spike Lee – never known for being subtle — has released a film adaptation of Pass Over. Nwandu’s long view, compacted into 90 minutes, hammers its blunt message home via a policeman’s truncheon that hits viewers upside the head.

Like African American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, whose script Appropriate was memorably produced by SpeakEasy Stage Company five years ago, Nwandu “appropriates” themes from other dramatists. Her  description of the setting is reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s sparse vision for Waiting for Godot – “A country road. A tree.” And the structure of her play – a story about two men waiting to “pass over” into the promised land that eludes them – mirrors the plot of Beckett’s absurdist yarn about two men waiting for deliverance from their squalid paralysis by a mysterious character named Godot who has promised to come for them (but never does).

In Pass Over, Moses (Kadahj Bennett) and Kitsch (Hubens “Bobby” Cius) are homeless and searching for a way out, a path beyond. (The third and fourth characters, Mister and Ossifer, are both played by Lewis D. Wheeler). There are Biblical references throughout as the two men reminiscence about religious classes they took and the promises they heard: one day they will be rewarded with the succor of  “milk and honey” that lies just beyond, when they will be freed from the muddied life they are living. But we realize, well before they do, that this is just another one of those pipe dreams told to the permanently mired. Like Beckett’s two forlorn hobos, no one is going anywhere.

The reason this production is so effective, to the point of being mesmerizing, is because of the marvelously energetic performances of Bennett and Cius, who riff off one another in amazing ways. Watch them strut their stuff. Observe their faces as they pout, and laugh, take turns mocking one another, embrace, as they reach out into dark space as if grasping for a life raft that isn’t there and never will be. It’s as if they’re listening to non-audible music (at least to us), high pitched and far off. They move to it, sway to it, surrender to it. And we watch in wonder. It’s a creative urban choreography that almost carries them away from their squalor into a kinder place where they can eat a full meal instead of gnawing on fetid crusts of bread. Wheeler’s squareness is the perfect foil for the pair’s desperately playful rhythms — he succeeds admirably as a white man in a tight suit, carrying a picnic basket with store-bought slices of pie. Beckett’s characters fight over chicken bones; Nwandu’s squabble over collard greens. High praise should also go to Anna Drummond for her sound design, which is perfectly in sync with Kathy A. Perkins’s powerful lighting.

If one of the aims of art is to create a distinctively imaginative world, than Pass Over succeeds in generating a landscape of devastation, a hopeless place filled with gaping wounds and visible scars. Better yet, this is a world that aims its unforgiving boot where we comfortably sit.


Robert Israel writes about theater, travel, and the arts, and is a member of Independent Reviewers of New England (IRNE). He can be reached at risrael_97@yahoo.com.

Share
Tweet
Pin
Share

By: Robert Israel Filed Under: Featured, Review, Theater Tagged: Antoinette Nwandu, Monica White Ndounou, Pass Over, Robert Israel, SpeakEasy Stage Company

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Search

Popular Posts

  • Album Review: The Tedeschi Trucks Band’s “I Am the Moon” — Part Three, “The Fall” “Episode III. The Fall” is the most thematically focuse... posted on July 25, 2022
  • Film Review: “Nope” – Behold, the Great American Spectacle Nope, Jordan Peele’s highly anticipated third feature... posted on August 2, 2022
  • Theater Review: Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s “Much Ado” — “A Giddy Thing” Shakespeare's text has been streamlined for easy consum... posted on July 29, 2022
  • 2022 Newport Folk Festival Review: An Occasion for Awe The Newport Folk Festival's biggest secrets were cleanl... posted on July 27, 2022
  • Arts Appreciation: Long Overdue — Homage to Julius Eastman, Fierce Black Queen Iconoclast Scorned and consigned to oblivion in his day, Julius Ea... posted on July 26, 2022

Social

Follow us:

Follow the Conversation

  • David Johnson August 9, 2022 at 6:31 am on Film Review: “Nope” – Behold, the Great American SpectacleThink of it as ALL INTERNAL SPECTACLE, which is what humans do in their consciousness ITSELF, and with their thinking...
  • William Collen August 8, 2022 at 11:40 am on Film Review: “Nope” – Behold, the Great American SpectacleI just saw Nope a few nights ago, and share your admiration. I wasn't really able to mentally integrate the...
  • Bruce Schleifman August 7, 2022 at 9:27 pm on Book Review: A Well-Written Biography of Stewart Brand — The Man Who Popularized Planetary ConsciousnessExcellent review Preston. I am looking forward to my next read thanks to you. Bruce
  • Amy Geller August 6, 2022 at 6:02 pm on Film Review: “A Love Song” — A Marvel of HumanityI agree! Gerry at his best - a social worker for great art, big and small.
  • Steve Provizer August 6, 2022 at 2:11 pm on Book Review: “Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld” — A Tale of Mobsters and MusiciansHe doesn't try to make a case for it, except for an occasional mention of criminals who actually liked the...

Footer

  • About Us
  • Advertising/Underwriting
  • Syndication
  • Media Resources
  • Editors and Contributors

We Are

Boston’s online arts magazine since 2007. Powered by 70+ experts and writers.

Follow Us

Monthly Archives

Categories

"Use the point of your pen, not the feather." -- Jonathan Swift

Copyright © 2022 · The Arts Fuse - All Rights Reserved · Website by Stephanie Franz