Nwandu - Pass Over

Copyright 2018 by Antoinette Nwandu
Introduction copyright 2019 by Antoinette Nwandu Cover artwork Alim Smith Nikes. Words and Music by Christopher Breaux, OmMas Keith, Carl Palmer, Harry Palmer, Jeff Palmer and James Blake Litherton. Copyright 2016 Heavens Research, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, EMI April Music Inc. and Buzzard And Kestrel Ltd. All Rights for Heavens Research Administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. and Buzzard And Kestrel Ltd. and Buzzard And Kestrel Ltd.

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Pass Over was developed over a period of nearly five years. I am deeply grateful to the following people and institutions: My many hundreds of students at the Borough of Manhattan Community College for keeping me on my toes, making me a better instructor, and reminding me what beautiful language sounds like. Evan Cabnet, Andr Bishop, and LCT3; Anna Shapiro, David Schmitz, Aaron Carter, and Steppenwolf; Angelina Fiordellisi, Janio Marrero, Seri Lawrence, Katori Hall, and The Cherry Lane Mentor Project; Michael Walkup, Rachel Karpf Reidy, and P73; Jonathan McCrory and The National Black Theatre; and Shawn Rene Graham and Playwrights Playground at The Classical Theater of Harlem. Spike Lee, who read the play, saw its urgency, and preserved it on film so that people who dont go to the theater can share in its wonder. Ted Hope, Scott Foundas, and Amazon Studios for giving this story such a readily accessible platform on Amazon Prime.

All the generous and talented directors and actors who enabled development of the piece along the way: Tea Alagic, Victor Maog, and LA Williams. Also Julian Parker, Ryan Hallahan, Jaime Lincoln Smith, Eden Marryshow, Joe Tapper, RJ Brown, Frank Harts, Jeff Biehl, Ruffin Prentiss, Khiry Walker, Carl Hendrick Louis, Bill Johnson, and Malik Ali. And especially Jon Michael Hill, Namir Smallwood, and Gabe Ebert, whose finesse, urgency, and professionalism made me a better writer. To my great and good collaborator, Danya Taymor, who said yes to this wild ride without hesitation, jumped in heart-plus-brain first, and made the play sing. And last but not least, thank you to Graham, my lover, husband, and friend. When Im at my lowest and worst, you believe in the work Im doing, and even more in me.

I love you.

I want this introduction to be a record of the process, oftentimes uncertain and serpentine, that resulted in the birthing of this play. I was skittish and impatient when I began writing this play, but possessed of an emotion so unsettling in its demands for acknowledgement, for action, that I had no choice but to embark. I began writing Pass Over at the end of 2013 and completed a first draft by the summer of 2014. The first few months were tumultuous: a while earlier I had endured a developmental process for another play that left me brittle, untrusting, and creatively empty. After that play was over, I wrote a few ten-minute plays, including Vanna White Has Got to Die, which was produced in the Obie Award-winning Fire This Times Annual Ten Minute Festival, but it took great effort and concentration to feel something other than resentment and anguish at the prospect of setting my hand to the work of writing another full-length play.

I knew at the outset that this play would concern a river crossing of some kind. I began by researching the routes that enslaved black peoplemy ancestorstook during the antebellum era, and became fascinated with stories centering around the Ohio River. I scoured ship manifests for names and very nearly decided to name my protagonist Prince, until a pair of names, Moses and Kitch, caught my attention, mostly because of the conflicts integral to their pairing. What must it have been like for an enslaved man to bear the name of a biblical patriarch who was himself born a prince and empowered to lead his people to freedom? And the name Kitch, a seemingly incomplete word whose sound arrested the breath when spoken aloud. These were the men about whom I would write. What I discovered, however, was that the voices pouring forth from these characters, full-throated and beautiful, were not from an antebellum past, but grounded in my reality.

These men were my contemporaries, and yet they were fully imbued with both biblical and antebellum experiences. The thrill of this discovery did much to motivate that first draft. It became daring and urgent, grounded in the research I had done, but speaking about the pain we feel so acutely today. When I did begin, beautifully, gracefully, the means to continue opened to me in the form of institutional support. I was accepted to the Dramatists Guild Fellowship and for the next nine months nurtured professional relationships among writers who held me accountable to the idea I couldnt shake. In June 2014, Pass Over was programmed at the National Black Theater of Harlems Keep Soul Alive reading series.

It was the first time I was presenting a developmental draft of a full-length play since the debilitating workshop production. I dont think I ever fully processed, until now, how much anxiety I held in my body during that reading. It is such a precious, necessary, and yet dangerous act to place our black voices into a public space. To honestly call out state-sanctioned violence during a reading at 7pm when the day, the week, the month has been spent grief-stricken and afraid at account after bloody account of that same violence. Violence that is the action-step of a system re-aligning itself to the centrality of white oppression after the optical misstep that was the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. After that reading and the rewrites it motivated, I sent the play into the world, despite the apprehension I felt.