PASS OVER: FILM REVIEW
Summer in Chicago can be a roller coaster. Lake Michigan’s cool embrace is a welcome antidote to the scorching summer heat and humidity, and the life that sunlight injects into the city is palpable. On the other hand, prominent abolitionist Mariame Kaba proclaims, “I dread summer.” The vacuum left by the structure of academics, surveillance, and policing violence threatens the young, Black people in her community on the South Side, where much of Chicago's Black population is consolidated. Over the summer, shootings rise and lives are lost, especially on certain corners. One of these corners is 64th and King, where Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over takes place.
Pass Over is a contemporary retelling of Samuel Beckett’s seminal Waiting for Godot, in which two men wait for a man named Godot, who never appears. Waiting for Godot is an absurdist work that defies precise interpretation – its audience is able to see what it needs to see; it does this in part by avoiding local specificity, and by casting white actors, who are often read as the default for interpreters to project onto. When location and race are infused into the absurdist dialogue and structure, place and specificity matter much more.
When the audience is introduced to protagonists Kitch and Moses, they are surrounded by sand. The two men, whose names have been taken from a South Carolina slavery manifesto, are individual, particular, and sort of poor, Everymans who might be two young men on any street corner today. The two men assert constantly that they want to “pass over,” though they do not explain what this might mean. We do know it might suggest leaving the block they live and sleep on – it might be a trip to the Loop or to heaven. In its scenic design, the play makes clear the challenge of this; Kitch and Moses are quite literally surrounded by “lines in the sand” that they are continually dared to cross. Even though their salvation lies across these lines in the sand, they have been disciplined into remaining at the corner of 64th and King. Police lurk at the corners of the stage, their presence felt even when the police, Ossifer (Blake DeLong), is nowhere to be found.
According to the New York Times, the intersection of 64th and King was the street corner that housed the most shootings in Chicago from 2011-2014. When I saw Pass Over in the summer of 2018, 64th and King may as well have been another world. Steppenwolf Theater, which hosted Pass Over’s Chicago run that preceded its recent transfer to Broadway, is located in Lincoln Park, one of the whiter and wealthier communities in the city. This is reflected by the audience’s ability to purchase $100 tickets, as well as the older, white demographic the theatre is known for.
Spike Lee’s filming of the production, streaming on Amazon Prime, combats the strangeness of this dynamic by choosing to frame the production through a special showing of the play that bussed residents of the South Side up to Steppenwolf’s doors. Lee’s cut of the play, then, is interspersed with pensive audience faces, with anxieties, with delight in seeing a thoughtful rendering of Black life in a typically white face. Sometimes the faces are covered in tears. This cinematographic and fourth-wall-breaking element allows the viewer to understand the relationship between the play at hand and the outside world. Often, the audience's laugh backtracks the show’s dialogue.
When I saw the show, there was much less laughter. In this way, Lee’s decision to film on a night with a largely Black audience lends an extra dimension to the linguistic structure of the piece. While to a white audience, the banter that Kitch and Moses engage in might be read as an homage to Beckett’s signature absurdism, what they actually encounter is a language barrier. The two main characters speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE), which many writers and theorists have labeled as its own language that overlaps with standard American English but with some notable differences. What a white audience might perceive to be nonsense, an audience more familiar with people who live lives that run parallel to Kitch and Moses’ perceive to be homosocial bonding and signification. This quick banter drives the 70-minute play forward at a comfortable clip, making the slowness when white characters emerge particularly unnerving. Words and phrases bump up against one another, and the history of the language divide in America is on full display. Nwandu’s script explores violence and discomfort that accompanies American racial dynamics through not only the plot, which pits two young aspiring Black men against a white system and its crypt keepers but also through an oscillating tonality that builds suspense throughout.
For all its messaging, Pass Over is also an excellent piece of theatre. Lee’s filming makes accessible an otherwise gatekept form of art, and the text is a unique work by an up-and-coming playwright performed by an immensely talented cast. The dialogue is quick and snappy, the technical elements are tight, and the cast has fantastic chemistry, especially intense moments. While the work might not be a typical cinematic experience, it is definitely a worthwhile endeavor for any film watcher with eclectic taste.