Survival Humor: Antoinette Nwandu's Pass Over

Antoinette Nwandu was an adjunct professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, teaching public speaking mostly to Black and brown students, when self-appointed neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager, on February 26, 2012. A year and a half later, a Florida jury found Zimmerman not guilty. The verdict was a formative moment for many young Black Americans, solidifying their sense that Martin's murder wasn’t an isolated incident, but part of a greater epidemic of violence against young Black men, and the structural failings of the legal system to deliver them justice.

As the trial unfolded, Nwandu shared in the collective fury and frustration. “I was a cauldron of anger and bewilderment, as well as the cyclical nature of history,” she recalls. “For every step forward the Black community makes—specifically young Black men—there is this equal and opposite specter of violence that resists that forward progress. On the one hand, Obama is elected president, but on the other documented violence against Black and brown men is routinely sanctioned by the police and the justice system.”

Nwandu’s day job put her in close proximity to that targeted demographic, and she witnessed first-hand the ramifications of unrelenting oppression. Two of her students struck up a friendship, but it ended abruptly after a series of absurd restrictions caused one to violate his parole and end up back in the system. (The other young man finished the semester.) Their divergent fates, and the greater political climate, fueled Nwandu to start writing Pass Over; she would ultimately leave her steady teaching job to pursue its development.

Pass Over’s multiple inspirations are matched by its layered literary influences. Nwandu riffs on two conflicting texts—the Exodus story and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot—imbuing the inherent intimacy of the play with the weight of history and theatrical tradition. Like the iconic Vladimir and Estragon in Godot, Nwandu’s characters Moses and Kitch are eternally waiting, stuck in a repetitive cycle of existential dread—except they’re trapped on their block, living in constant fear of police violence and dreaming of a different future. “How can I keep the surface area of the play small but give it very deep roots?” Nwandu asked herself, “When you compare contemporary young Black men on a street corner to young slaves to young Israelites, what essential truths can we distill from all of these different historical moments?”

Beckett was Nwandu’s gateway to theatre: she wrote her English senior thesis on his trilogy of novels, then promptly consumed his entire oeuvre. The prominence of biblical imagery and structure in the stories and spirituals of the African-American community, and in speeches from the Civil Rights Movement, were essential elements of Moses and Kitch’s vision of their own promised land, grounding their desire for a way out in stories and images from their lives.

Nwandu mines Beckett’s dark humor, but a jazzy, playful liveliness permeates Moses and Kitch’s dynamic. (In a program note for the LCT3 production, she cites the seminal Abbott & Costello’s “Who’s On First?” routine as an influence, as well as The Lucas Brothers, identical twin comedians from inner city Newark.) The two men riff, they roast, they dance on the precipice of the abyss with a mash-up of soaring musicality and gallows humor. “It makes you ask, ‘Okay, why are we making jokes right now?’ We're making jokes right now to remind ourselves that we're alive, we're together, and we're trying to survive. Survival humor,” says Nwandu. “The radical nature of that act, of that choice, is a form of resistance—of continuing to promote and honor your own humanity when every single voice and person says you’re not a human.”

This defiant spirit extends not only to the play’s language—Nwandu forgoes punctuation, creating a distilled score of text—but also in Moses and Kitch’s frequent use of the n-word. The word evolved from “negro” into an intentionally derogatory slur in the seventeenth century, and was used by white people to threaten and dehumanize Black people from the time of enslavement to the terrorism and lynchings of the Jim Crow era to the Civil Rights Movement. The painful history of the n-word, and its power to articulate white people’s hatred, remains an open wound in this country. In a note at the beginning of the script, Nwandu lays bare her rules of engagement: “Aside from the actors saying lines of dialogue while in character, this play is in no way shape or form an invitation for anyone to use the n-word. Not during table work, not during talkbacks, not during after-work drinks.” And to her audience, Nwandu extends this challenge: to resist judging Moses and Kitch’s reclamation of the language of their oppression. “People will be offended by that word, but that doesn't mean these men don't deserve to be alive,” she says. “If we're talking quite literally about a matter of life and death, a matter of respectability politics, then the language these men use, or the fact that their language offends you, doesn't negate their right to inherit whatever promise America purports to offer.”

Pass Over interrogates that American myth of equal opportunity: Who’s actually allowed to get ahead? Who makes the rules in this country? And who passively stands by while injustice accumulates? The play’s ending offers an indictment of the latter; Nwandu shows the harrowing consequences of white people’s inaction and paralysis in the face of racist violence. It’s a direct confrontation of complicity, but one that’s in line with Nwandu’s artistic mission: “I'm here to be witness to truth. Full stop. To be a witness to what I see happening in the world today.”

—Lauren Halvorsen