The play that has given the Chicago theater world all its excitement this summer is Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over at Steppenwolf. I bought a ticket to get in on the action. Not too much has happened yet when shots ring out and the two young black protagonists, Moses and Kitch, throw themselves to the ground. The shots come from nowhere—without warning and from no visible source—but we think we know (well, I thought I knew; maybe you knew better) what they signify. Moses and Kitch are mired in a ghetto they long to escape, and ambient gangbanging is surely one reason why. But Nwandu soon sets us straight—in her play the guns belong to the cops. Whenever shots ring out and Moses and Kitch drop—a recurrent event—it’s the Man making sure these two boys stay right where they are.
We denounce the viewpoints expressed in some of these reviews as they fail to acknowledge the very systemic racism that “Pass Over” addresses directly. Particularly egregious are the comments from Sun Times critic Hedy Weiss, whose critical contribution has, once again, revealed a deep seated bigotry and a painful lack of understanding of this country’s historic racism.
Steppenwolf didn’t settle for saying Weiss was past her prime; it called her a clueless bigot. Let me tip the scales here by putting in a word of my own about those final scenes. Nwandu’s ending has the white racist cop receiving some sort of theatrically incoherent comeuppance that allows her two heroes a brief illusion of emancipation. But it’s immediately dispelled, in a twist less devastating than melodramatic. If you ask me, the way it condescends is in asking the audience to react with the mind-blown shock of college sophomores. The Tribune’s Chris Jones also had problems with the ending, and I hope Nwandu recognizes that there’s work to do.
Consider the gang-bangers, ignored by Nwandu but front and center in the early pages of Coates’s book and a corrosive part of his boyhood. “When I was your age the only people I knew were black,” Coates writes, remembering on his son’s behalf his own fearful boyhood navigating his small portion of Baltimore. “and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid.” Coates is instructing his boy in Ghetto 101. “The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their world. . . . I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear.”
Coates would have no argument with Nwandu over where ultimate responsibility lies. Describing inquiries he made into the death of a college friend shot by a cop, he writes, “I was told that the citizens were more likely to ask for police support than to complain about brutality. I was told that the black citizens of [Prince George’s County, Virginia] were comfortable and had ‘a certain impatience” with crime. I had seen these theories before. . .” But he tells his son, “‘Black-on-black’ crime is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel [to red-liners]. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was once drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return. . . .To yell ‘black-on-black crime’ is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.”
I’m sorry to say Nwandu signed the petition.
