Theatre Review: PASS OVER

Thank the Heavens, Broadway theatre — with safety measures that will hopefully remain intact — arrives during difficult times during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The well-awaited arrival is Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s play Pass Over, a Danya Taymor-directed twofer (there is a third entity, but it’s about our pair) story that focuses on two Black men who mourn and dream of a future while the history and present of institutional racism suction hope. Moses (Jon Michael Hill)and Kitch (Namir Smallwood) kill time at a street light as they try to figure out how not to waste time. They fill in the blanks of time by bantering, throwing barbs, joking, bickering, dreaming of the Promise Land, flirting with the idea to leave yet seem glued to the spot.

Trapped by inaction or a society that won’t incentivize or provide for their wellbeing, their exchange of barbs is a means of coping, especially in the wake of police violence murdering Moses’s brother. The two come to conclude that maybe acting a little bit like the white man — erasing the N-word from their vocabulary — could bring them to the Promiseland. Threatening forces hammer in — through gunpoint — that the white forces won’t let them pop the bubble of the status quo.

Another entity, embodied masterfully by Gabriel Ebert, disturbs their existence. First, he’s the “Mister,” his spic-and-span three-piece suit and Nikes and his picnic basket full of goodies that he offers to the boys, but Ebert morphs into a serpentous monster, the white man who believes in his innocuousness and generosity but never interested in prodding the status quo. When Ebert vanishes and returns, he’s a cowardly but aggressive cop.

You can only do a Waiting for Godot slow-burn for so long with a stagnant set (scenic designer Wilson Chin), and it reaches a length where Hill and Wood’s vibrating chemistry does the heavy lifting. But when the deliberate repetitious momentum is about to fizzle out, we’re suddenly hurled into a reckoning and a transformative set where green burst and creep into the set and the two see their Promiseland. But the final hiss signifies that the serpent will always be lurking.

Pass Over is playing till October 10th at the August Wilson Theatre. There is also The play has also seen a 2018 iteration, filmed by Spike Lee and available on Amazon Video, with Hill as Moses.