In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon wait for the arrival of someone who will never show. Their location, typically staged as a barren landscape, is given in the text as “A country road. A tree. Evening.”
Antoinette Nwandu says Beckett “was the artist who made me understand that theater was something that I wanted to do and invited me in.” In her play Pass Over, Moses and Kitch are unable to wait in their environment (“a ghetto street. a lamppost. night”) without interference, interrogation and intimidation from Mister and Ossifer, two white men who encroach upon their space. For young African-American men such as Trayvon Martin, whose murder in Florida in 2012 Nwandu identifies as a touchstone for Pass Over, simply “hanging around is a dangerous activity.”
Like their Beckettian counterparts, Moses and Kitch swing between despair and optimism, passing the time with gallows humour, cyclical, familiar chat, and flights of the imagination. The opening scene of Beckett’s play is undercut by Estragon struggling to remove his boot and examining his feet which are “swelling visibly.” He is accused by is partner of “blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.” Pass Over’s Kitch dreams of a “new new” pair of Air Jordans, while Moses wants a drawer full of clean socks. When the sinister Mister arrives with a picnic basket, he tells them “gosh/ my feet are tired/it’s because I’ve got weak arches/ always have.”
Their litany of Air Jordans and sock drawers are part of a game called Promised Land Top Ten. Other longed-for items include “soft sheets”, “world peace”, and “my brotha here wit me/ back from da dead.” The Biblical allusion to the Promised Land has its own aspiration-laden counterpart in Beckett, when Estragon says
I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That’s where we’ll go, I used to say, that’s where we’ll for our honeymoon. We’ll swim. We’ll be happy.
In Genesis, God promises Canaan to Abraham. The promise is fulfilled in the Book of Exodus when Abraham’s descendants, the Israelites, are led by Moses out Egypt and slavery. God facilitates their escape by sending down ten plagues upon the Egyptians, and enabling Moses to part the Red Sea, drowning the pursuing Egyptian chariots. Kitch references this episode in his Promised Land list: Number Seven is for the police to “get fucked up by god and shit[…] cuz he send down/ plagues and shit/ like/ fuck you egyptian po-pos/ here’s some locusts.” The Moses of Pass Over follows his Biblical namesake in his purging the evil from Ossifer:
yo ass was preachin
to dem po-pos
spoke yo truth
like
like blood up on dem door posts
The Exodus story, commemorated and retold annually in the Jewish Passover, has been a cornerstone of African American Christianity for centuries, and was a recurring motif in discourse during both the abolitionist / emancipation movements and during the Civil Rights Movement. It was referenced in spirituals such as ‘Oh Mary, Don’t You Weep’ and ‘Go down, Moses” (quoted by Mister in Pass Over), as well as in sermons. One such sermon was delivered by an enslaved African named David in 1775, in which he aligned the plight of the slaves with the Israelites whom God freed from slavery in Egypt. Martin Luther King Jr. drew on the Exodus story in several speeches; in 1954, he compared the Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate public schools to the Red Sea parting. In 1971, Malcolm X declared that white America was a “modern American House of Bondage,” doomed to the same fate as the Egyptians in Exodus, and identifying the Honourable Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam’s leader, with Moses.
“When Israel was in Egypt's land
Let my people go
Oppress’d so hard they could not stand
Let my people go
Go down, Moses
Way down in Egypt's land
Tell old Pharaoh
Let my people go”
from the spiritual “Go Down, Moses”
For Moses and Kitch, eating together from Mister’s picnic basket references both Estragon eating Pozzo’s discarded chicken bones in Waiting for Godot and the Israelite’s consumption of unleavened bread, remembered in the Jewish Seder every Passover. The layering of myth and of histories is very alive in Nwandu’s play, which at once takes place on a street, “but also a plantation […] but also Egypt, a city built by slaves”, and is set in the 13th century BCE, “but also 1855”, but also, and most pressingly, “now. right now.” Moses and Kitch’s desire for freedom, to move beyond a present state of oppression, bondage and violence, is one weighted in history. This passing-over, hoped for and denied to Moses, amounts to “plans/ to git my ass up o dis block”, “plans to rise up to my full potential” and “be all I can be.”
—John King