to Die, which was produced in the Obie Award-winning Fire This Time’s Annual Ten Minute Festival, but it took great effort and concentration to feel something other than resentment and anguish at the prospect of setting my hand to the work of writing another full-length play.
I knew at the outset that this play would concern a river crossing of some kind. I began by researching the routes that enslaved black people—my ancestors—took during the antebellum era, and became fascinated with stories centering around the Ohio River. I scoured ship manifests for names and very nearly decided to name my protagonist Prince, until a pair of names, Moses and Kitch, caught my attention, mostly because of the conflicts integral to their pairing. What must it have been like for an enslaved man to bear the name of a biblical patriarch who was himself born a prince and empowered to lead his people to freedom? And the name Kitch, a seemingly incomplete word whose sound arrested the breath when spoken aloud. These were the men about whom I would write.
What I discovered, however, was that the voices pouring forth from these characters, full-throated and beautiful, were not from an antebellum past, but grounded in my reality. These men were my contemporaries, and yet they were fully imbued with both biblical and antebellum experiences. The thrill of this discovery did much to motivate that first draft. It became daring and urgent, grounded in the research I had done, but speaking about the pain we feel so acutely today.
When I did begin, beautifully, gracefully, the means to continue opened to me in the form of institutional support. I was accepted to the Dramatists Guild Fellowship and for the next nine months nurtured professional relationships among writers who held me accountable to the idea I couldn’t shake.
In June 2014, Pass Over was programmed at the National Black Theater of Harlem’s Keep Soul Alive reading series. It was the first time I was presenting a developmental draft of a full-length play since the debilitating workshop production. I don’t think I ever fully processed, until now, how much anxiety I held in my body during that reading. It is such a precious, necessary, and yet dangerous act to place our black voices into a public space. To honestly call out state-sanctioned violence during a reading at 7pm when the day, the week, the month has been spent grief-stricken and afraid at account after bloody account of that same violence. Violence that is the action-step of a system re-aligning itself to the centrality of white oppression after the optical misstep that was the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama.
After that reading and the rewrites it motivated, I sent the play into the world, despite the apprehension I felt. My tenure as a Dramatists Guild Fellow ended that October, but thankfully, by the following January, I found myself part of Ars Nova’s two-year Play Group residency. I put Pass Over on the backburner of my creative mind, trusting that the way forward would make itself known. It did in November 2015 when Pass Over was selected for the Cherry Lane Mentorship program. What’s valuable about Cherry Lane (at least in New York) is that it provides early-career writers the opportunity to present work to paying audiences without the pressure of critical response. Rehearsal schedules are fast and furious, productions come together on a shoestring budget, but writers can see the essence of what they’ve made and learn more about it from an audience.
During the workshop rehearsal process I made several changes to the script, my initial attempts to work toward what seemed like a major rewrite of the text. The impact of those changes was lost to me, however, after a personal tragedy claimed my focus and attention. My grandmother, Cynthia, who had been like a second mother to me, transitioned suddenly the morning after the workshop opened. I traveled home to Los Angeles to say goodbye and mourn with family, my play was the last thing on my mind. When I did return my attention to it, the work I had done during the Cherry Lane process seemed fuzzy and incoherent. I love being a writer, but I am reminded that it is a job that when done well, denies compartmentalization. It calls upon so much of who we are that when life unleashes sadness or suffering in other areas, we do well to allow ourselves the time to heal and reflect.
Once my workshop production ended in April 2016, my reflections about Pass Over coalesced into a desire to embark on a major rewrite in order to include a police officer character. At this point, the plot involved Moses and Kitch interacting with Mister; the threat of violence entered the space as anonymous gunshots that kept our heroes afraid, but not much else. I wanted to make that threat more immediate, but feared that introducing a police officer character would place the audience ahead of the action of the play. Once an armed white man in uniform stepped onstage, we’d instinctively know where the play would end up. My logical mind told me to abandon the idea, but my gut knew there was a way forward.
During my time in PlayGroup, my professional identity got a leg up in the world. I signed with agents and was offered my first professional production at Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. I decided on a director and lived everyday anticipating the fact that my primary professional goal for the last four years—to enjoy a World Premiere of one of my plays—was about to occur.
Weeks before it did, however, I would have to replace my director and two of the cast’s three actors. I firmly believe that the right people for the show ended up working on the show—among them Danya Taymor, who has proven a generous and like-minded collaborator and friend. That said, losing my initial collaborators weeks before the start of rehearsal was an ordeal that clarified for me the depths of grace, clarity, and resolve available to a person working with purpose and intention.
Danya directed a stellar cast consisting of Jon Michael Hill, Julian Parker, and Ryan Hallahan, and on June 11, 2017, we opened in the Upstairs Theatre. That my rehearsal process included completing the rewrite I’d envisioned all those months before is a testament to the flexibility, imagination, and sheer talent of my collaborators. They allowed me the space to overhaul the script (no small task during a World Premiere rehearsal process), and believed in the changes I was making. In the end, Ryan Hallahan was double cast as both Mister and Ossifer, a cop whose life is forever changed after his encounter with Moses and Kitch on the block.
The production made a much bigger impact than anyone could have anticipated, in part after a pair of racially insensitive reviews stoked the ire of the Chicago Theatre community of color. Details of that conflict and its aftermath—including my response in American Theater Magazine—can be found elsewhere. For my part, I left Chicago exhausted but proud. The play was out in the world, and audiences were responding.
I would go on to do one more rewrite during the rehearsal process a year later as the play received its New York premiere at Lincoln Center theater. Danya once again directed the production and Jon Michael Hill starred as Moses. But this time, Namir Smallwood played Kitch and Gabe Ebert played Mister/Ossifer. The rewrites this time around focused on Mister’s final monologue, making it much less overt. I also added a section to the first encounter between Moses and Kitch, and Ossifer that allows them to seemingly get away with their plan to speak “correctly” for a few destabilizing minutes.
Once again audiences energetically received the play, and thankfully the critical response—the production garnered a New York Times Critics’ Pick—happened without controversy. It is that final version of the text that is published here.
Antoinette Nwandu
February 2019
… and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.
—Exodus 12:13
Oh, chillun
Oh, don’t you want to go, to that gospel feast
That promised land, that land where all is peace?
—Deep River, a negrospiritual
RIP Trayvon, that nigga look just like me.
—Frank
