ANTOINETTE CHINONYE NWANDU:
TRAMPI N G H ER OWN E XODUS TO JOY By Kelundra Smith
As a new version of ‘Pass Over’ gets ready to reopen Broadway, its playwright is poised for a fresh chapter. poverty, and police brutality. Walking the streets of New York and seeing a city still scarred, she recognized that the Broadway version of Pass Over needed to be a rallying cry for unity, liberation, and joy—i.e., one in which the character of Moses doesn’t fall to police violence, as in previous drafts, but lives to fight another day.
These days, playwright Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu (she/her) is focused on her peace of mind. After a year living through the tumults of the COVID-19 pandemic and some personal strife, she’s ready to celebrate. And she has plenty reason to: namely, the Broadway debut of her play Pass Over in September (previews begin Aug. 4). Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s existential play Waiting for Godot, Pass Over finds two Black men essentially trapped in a “nowhere place” as they try to pass the time and stay out of the crosshairs of an angry police officer.
American Theatre recently caught up with Nwandu on a busy afternoon as she was getting a manicure between meetings. We spoke about the development of Pass Over, the tradition of the tramp, and her hopes for the future.
Nwandu has been living with the play for the last five years, and it has changed with each staging. It premiered at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago in 2017, in a production captured by director Spike for Prime Video. A year later the play made its Off-Broadway debut at Lincoln Center Theater, but it wasn’t until the beginning of 2020 that discussions about a Broadway run began. Then the pandemic shutdown happened, and along with the rest of us, Nwandu watched as the nation roiled in the turmoil of competing pandemics in healthcare,
KELUNDRA SMITH: You’ve been living with this script for a long time. What made you stick with it? ANTOINETTE NWANDU: The motto I have adopted for this production is: “It’s above me.” I’m staying with it because the divine spirit continues to keep it in my life. If it was up to me, I would have moved on, but the spirit insists that I stay. I think that until I make the play into the version of itself that people need most—my dream is to make
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