They try to believe they can pass over to a better place. They fantasize about a better world, in which they are not trapped, without hope, in a stark urban setting. The two men, played by Jon Michael Hill and Namir Smallwood, try to provide each other with the emotional sustenance they are denied anywhere else. There is a streetlamp, a milk crate, an abandoned tire, a steel drum. In Danya Taymor’s production at the August Wilson Theater, the set is spare. “Pass Over” is the story of Moses and Kitch, two young Black men who have little more than each other. I am grateful for brilliant art that moves me beyond the emotional walls I build around myself. But when I’m reading a beautiful book or I watch a poignant moment in a movie or television show or even a commercial, something tightly held will break loose inside me, and tears will stream down my face.
My misguided stoicism is something I hold as a ridiculous, slightly self-destructive point of pride. When I’m on the verge of tears, I try to hold them back. I am not much of a crier in my actual life. What moved me was knowing how the decision Kitch needs to make is both easy and impossible. One of the two main characters in the play, Kitch, is faced with the choice of a purgatorial existence with something material he covets, or an eternity in paradise, free from worldly suffering. At the end of Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s Broadway play, “Pass Over,” I was in tears.
