Antoinette Nwandu has a thing for getting lost. In an interview with American Theatre, she described how she writes by “creating a puzzle” for herself: “The process of building the play is figuring that puzzle out.” She draws connections across vast swaths of cultural narratives, through chronological and geographic dissonance: Pass Over, for instance (produced in Studio’s 2019-2020 Main Series after explosive productions in New York and Chicago), draws into conversation the biblical story of Exodus, the language and liturgy of the Black church, and Samuel Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece Waiting for Godot. “One of my creative impulses is that I’m very drawn to the different ways that we create epic,” she explains.
Currently under commission from Ars Nova, Audible, Colt Coeur, and Echo Theater Company, Nwandu brings a studied and deft eye to her work. She’s received support from The Sundance Theater Lab, The Cherry Lane Mentor Project (mentor: Katori Hall), The Kennedy Center, PlayPenn, and Space on Ryder Farm, among others, and is an alum of new play groups such as the Ars Nova Play Group and the Dramatists Guild Fellowship. She is the recipient of The Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and The Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, among others, and her plays were included on the Kilroys (a compilation of best new work from female, trans, and non-binary playwrights) in 2016 and again in 2017.
In Nwandu’s earlier works, such as Black Boy & the War (2011), Vanna White Must Die (2012), and FLAT SAM (2013), we see the beginnings of her interest in the interplay of familiar stories writ slant: Vanna White Must Die’s playful inversion of expectations around long-term relationships and impressing the in-laws, say, or FLAT SAM’s look at a self-identified “military wife” repairing familial relationships fractured by war. In 2018, she exploded open this combination with Breach: a manifesto on race in America through the eyes of a black girl recovering from self-hate. Produced by Victory Gardens, Breach looks at the precariousness of living in a black, female, and pregnant body, in a world legislated by men and ordered around white supremacy—and sustained, also, by what she calls “crucial moments of intentional joy…of choosing to promote and honor your own humanity when every single voice and person says you’re not a human.”
Pass Over, meanwhile, took shape in 2013, while Nwandu was experiencing a writing drought and teaching at a community college in New York, in a class with “two young African-American students who were expert at getting me off-topic [and who] were both dear to me, and then increasingly to each other.” A few months later, one of them stopped showing up for class; Nwandu repeatedly contacted him but heard no responses. When he showed up weeks later, he revealed that he’d been absent because he’d violated his parole. “This was right around the time of Trayvon Martin’s death,” she explains. Martin was just seventeen years old when George Zimmerman murdered him. The collision of these three situations (her writing relationship, her two young students, and Martin’s murder) got her “to a place where…I was very frustrated with what felt like an incredibly absurd cycle of both violence and inertia.” Articulating that cycle—its relentlessness punctured by the restlessness of despair—took time, and lots of it: Nwandu wrote a total of 97 drafts of Pass Over before she found the version that sung.
The question Nwandu kept asking herself through nearly 100 drafts was not necessarily how to break the cycle, but how to trace it down to its bones and neighbors: “Taking these two stories [Exodus and Waiting for Godot], how do I talk about violence against young black men, specifically police violence, in a way that also touches on other texts?” It’s a concern of intimacy—how what we see is threaded through with what we’ve heard—that’s also interested in implication and the tangled ways in which we’re stitched into each other. This concern is Nwandu’s pilot light; it’s why she draws such an expansive landscape (exit signs included) of our human inclination towards myth-making, what Joan Didion called “the stories we tell ourselves in order to live.” Nwandu brings us right to those stories—of identity and shared yet disparate inheritance—and challenges us to stay with them, so that we might understand how we got from there to here.
—Sarah Cooke