In PASS OVER, Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s "powerful and provocative" (Arifa Akbar, The Guardian) new play, Moses and Kitch talk smack, pass the time, and hope that maybe today will be different. As they dream of their promised land, a stranger wanders into their space and disrupts their plans. Evoking heartbreak, hope, and joy over its 85 minutes, PASS OVER crafts everyday profanities into poetic and humorous riffs, illuminating the unquestionable human spirit of young men looking for a way out.
Jesse Green of The New York Times calls this Critic's Pick "blazingly theatrical and thrillingly tense." Time Out cheers, “FOUR STARS! It's ingenious, poetic and unsettling." And The Hollywood Reporter raves, “PASS OVER is a powerfully imaginative drama that will shake up audiences, instantly tagging the playwright as a significant new voice.”
'Pass Over' is not for everyone - or even most people - but it is for those who are ready and willing to take in a raw, incendiary, and challenging (though often entertaining and gripping) piece of contemporary theater. I admire the play tremendously while also finding it to be repetitive, uncomfortable, and bewildering. I've really missed shows like this.
In moving to Broadway, Nwandu has, while redrafting, given the script a new ending. Nwandu was raised in (and left) the evangelical church, and a sermonizing energy is certainly at work inside the play. It exhorts and exposits; it kindles the faithful. In changing the conclusion, though, she seems to be deliberately acting more as pastor than as preacher, taking care of herself, her cast, and her audience by eliding the earlier version's most hopeless moments. Some of these new, final scenes do still feel a bit improvisational. The flawlessness of the earlier sections falls away, and we can almost hear the 'let's try this?' of the rehearsal room. But I think the awkwardness of this happier ending might actually be the point.
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