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Corrib Theatre’s 2024–25 season has been built around Waiting for Godot, for both the piece itself and other shows inspired by Samuel Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece. Antoinette Nwandu’s 2017 play Pass Over is the first in this series of plays, grafting Godot’s format onto a contemporary Black American story. In doing so, Pass Over highlights the cultural differences between the Irish and Black diasporas in a story that’s funny, tragic and all too relevant.
Like Godot, Pass Over follows the idle conversations of two tramps: Moses (Emmanuel Davis) and Kitch (Nik Whitcomb), who muse on the issues of the day on the crime-ridden streets of Chicago. Pass Over differs from Godot in how characters deal with their stations in life. Godot’s Vladimir and Estragon can only passively marvel at the irrationality of waiting for a man who never appears, but Moses and Kitch are more restless, plotting their exodus from the block before they catch a stray bullet. Moses in particular is driven to reach the Promised Land, while Kitch’s focus on their material needs keeps the pair grounded, even as Moses derides him for his “plantation thinking.” For Vladimir and Estragon, there’s nothing to be done to change their fate, but for the leads of Pass Over, the only paths forward are deliverance or death.
Moses and Kitch’s primary impediments come in two representatives of White America, both played by Jake Street: Mister, a suspiciously kind suburbanite lost in the slums, and Ossifer, the sadistic policeman whose duty is to make sure the pair know “their place.” While Ossifer represents the overt violence of the state, Mister is ultimately the more insidious of the two, putting on a “gosh golly gee” affectation to mask his fears, both of our heroes and the abstract threat of losing his privilege. His textless red baseball cap acts not only as an allusion to Little Red Riding Hood—Mister enters the scene carrying a basket of goodies for his ailing mother—but under the current political climate, it’s an immediate signifier that he’s not to be trusted.
The backbone of Pass Over is the dialogue between Moses and Kitch, a profane banter that covers dreams of the future, mourning the departed, and using that certain word beginning with the letter N. It’s the sort of dialogue you’d find in a Spike Lee joint, which is fitting as Lee himself filmed a performance of the Steppenwolf Theatre’s production of the show in 2017. Davis and Whitcomb showcase a lived-in camaraderie that, while tense at times, is rooted in a deep love and shared trauma that binds our heroes together, whether they like it or not.
Pass Over’s set is ordinary by design: a run-down street corner, strewn with trash and illuminated by a single street lamp. At the same time, a fog machine blankets the Historic Alberta House’s stage with an ethereal haze, as if Moses and Kitch’s block is some far off mystical land and not a neighborhood in any major city in America. This surreal atmosphere pays off during the climax, when the story takes on a magical-realist twist and Moses starts living up to his namesake. The twist serves to reflect both the reality of discrimination and the absurdity that it still exists at all.
Nwandu wrote Pass Over in 2015, when the Black Lives Matter movement and discussions of police violence were starting to rise up as pillars of the broader cultural zeitgeist. A decade later, these issues are still tragically relevant, especially as the Trump administration seeks to eliminate civil rights protections that date back to the ’60s. Pass Over’s urgency has only grown in that time—not as a plea for kindness, but a demand for recognition and empathy in the face of ignorance and fear. It embodies the anger and sorrow of a subculture and invites to share in those emotions as Moses and Kitch look ever onward, past the sea, to the freedom that’s long overdue to them.
SEE IT: Pass Over at the Historic Alberta House, 5131 NE 23rd Ave., 503-307–9599, corribtheatre.org. 7:30 pm Thursday–Saturday, 2 pm Sunday, Feb. 27–March 9. $15–$45.