Pass Over
Opening Night: August 22, 2021
Closing: October 10, 2021
Theater: August Wilson Theatre
In Pass Over, 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, the show crafts everyday profanities into poetic and humorous riffs, illuminating the unquestionable human spirit of young men looking for a way out.
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August 22, 2021
For a play with just four characters and a single, sparsely furnished set, Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s “Pass Over” feels almost momentous — even historic. This is in part due to the timing of its arrival on Broadway, as the first new production to open after the unprecedented 16-month closing of the theaters due to the pandemic.
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August 22, 2021
On Wednesday night, when a preshow announcement informed the 1,200 or so people at the August Wilson Theater that they were “one of the first audiences back to see a real Broadway play,” the response was the kind of roar you’d expect for a beloved diva returning from rehab. And “Pass Over,” by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, does not disappoint in that regard. Having survived pandemic jitters (so far) and its own circuitous path to get there, it emerged like a star: in top shape, at full throttle and refreshed by some artful doctoring.
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August 22, 2021
Is it safe to go back to Broadway? It doesn’t feel that way at Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s bold and impassioned Pass Over, the first play to open on the Street since the shutdown began last March. I’m not talking about COVID protection, which is taken seriously at the August Wilson Theatre; members of the audience must provide proof of vaccination at the door and remain masked throughout the show. I mean that Pass Over is not a play that plays it safe.
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August 22, 2021
In Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s surreal and morbidly funny existential drama “Pass Over,” two characters who might be fugitives from a Samuel Beckett play find themselves in a world where being Black means being trapped forever on a blasted heath on the wrong side of the Promised Land.
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August 22, 2021
The encounter with Mister was already one of the theater’s great scenes, and it hits even more powerfully on Broadway, where it can expand to fill the enormous room. Ebert and Hill and Smallwood and director Danya Taymor and Nwandu keep the tension rising and rising, Mister’s gleeful Leave It to Beaver exaggerations (Gee!) the source of an almost unbearable — but still hilarious — menace.
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August 22, 2021
The play, a canny, streetwise meld of Beckett and the Bible suffused with magic realism and even an apparent fondness for ’70s sitcom The Jeffersons and its famous “Movin’ On Up” theme song, does indeed reflect this moment in time. With its lingering doubts and braveries, its dramaturgical sharpness giving way to a messiness that feels somehow unfinished, Pass Over is a forthright work of serious intent and comic panache, beautifully acted by its three-person cast and powerful in its angry, hopeful voice.
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August 22, 2021
Yet, even before “Pass Over” takes a wild turn with the entrance of a nattily dressed alien from another world, those two Black men, Moses (Jon Michael Hill) and Kitch (Namir Smallwood), begin to emerge as a well-honed comedy act, one from the golden age of vaudeville that also conjures up Vladimir and Estragon’s endless wait for Godot. And unlike Samuel Beckett’s characters, these men are fully aware that the little corner of the universe they inhabit is where they’ll die.
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August 22, 2021
Was this one worth the flight? Mostly. “Pass Over” is a compelling, if flawed, way to start things off in Times Square. Nwandu’s central conceit is spot-on: Take the format of Samuel Beckett’s classic “Waiting for Godot” and exchange his stuck-in-place duo Didi and Gogo — “Let’s go.” “We can’t.” — for two black men on a generic city street corner. More modern than Sam’s tramps, but just as immobile. The iconic tree is now a street lamp; grass and dirt are cement and asphalt.
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August 22, 2021
For all you wary ticket buyers out there, I’m here to declare it can be done. Wear a mask and enjoy a play, that is. I did it the other night, in Broadway’s August Wilson Theatre, for the wholly refreshing experience of watching three splendid actors go through the sardonic hoops of Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s existential comedy, “Pass Over.”
READ THE REVIEWAugust 22, 2021
Antoinette Chinoye Nwandu’s Pass Over has opened on Broadway, making it the first play to appear there since theaters were closed down as a result of the pandemic 17 months ago. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this allegorical, racially charged drama is sadly more relevant than ever.
READ THE REVIEWAugust 22, 2021
It is good to be back in a Broadway theater—with an Excelsior Pass, a mask, and two (two!) exuberant rounds of applause during the pre-show announcement. It is good to be at Pass Over—an intense and provocative new play by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu that updates Waiting for Godot, sort of, to examine the constricted and oppressed lives of young inner-city Black men.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 1, 2021
Great news, theater folx: Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu fixed Waiting for Godot. The fearless new playwright took Samuel Beckett’s much-endured 1953 classic and gave it a relatable context, emotional stakes, and an ending that doesn’t send audiences staggering out in search of a razor blade shop. Pass Over, Nwandu’s Broadway debut, is remarkable not only for being the first drama to open on the Great White Way after 528 days of pandemic lockdown, but for improving on a piece that often feels like it lasts 528 days.
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August 25, 2021
A promising Sun is dawning at the August Wilson Theatre, and not just because Broadway is officially back. Pass Over, a mostly captivating one-acter by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, represents a hopeful new chapter in Broadway history, not only as the first play staged since the COVID-19 lockdown, but as the first of seven by Black writers to be produced this season.
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