Review: River & Rail’s ‘Pass Over’ – Important Theatre, Compelling Performances

There are so many compelling reasons to see Pass Over from River & Rail Theatre Company—where to begin? First, Antoinette Nwandu’s existential new tragi-comedy is currently running on Broadway to substantial acclaim; the very fact that another production of it is running simultaneously—and in Knoxville, to boot—can be traced to the rare occurrence of a previous agreement in place before it found its way to New York’s August Wilson Theatre. That New York production has the distinction of being the first full play to open on Broadway since the Covid-19 lockdown darkened theatres everywhere.

A second compelling reason would be Nwandu’s sharply incisive take on two young black men, Moses (Ryan F. Johnson) and Kitch (Davion T. Brown), who endure the mind-numbing entrapment of their existence in a police-driven authoritarian environment in which violence defines the boundaries of their world, both real and abstract. Nwandu has painted the characters, though, with a multi-dimensional brush, showing their hopes and dreams through dialog and interactions that are often both comic and tragic, humorous and savage, flippant and insightful, and deliciously slathered with copious amounts of physicality and juicy street profanity.

Geovonday Jones’ direction here glides its way past mere action and descriptive punctuation, past the sense of ghetto, past the Old Testament references, into the elusive concept of an exodus to “The Promised Land.” His work with Johnson and Brown as Moses and Kitch has created intriguingly distinct characters with intriguingly distinct body language. He moves them through the Kaylin Gess multi-level set with purposeful energy, inevitably constrained somewhat claustrophobically by its physical boundaries. An unclimbable ladder against the back wall seems a possible escape route, yet for the pair it is a visual metaphor for their enslavement in their urban block.

In at least a structural sense, Pass Over may remind one of Waiting for Godot, the Samuel Beckett play about two characters unable to escape eternity. Like with Beckett’s Pozzo and Lucky, Nwandu complicates the existence of Moses and Kitch with the arrival on their urban block of the outsider, the very-white and out-of-touch Mister. Mister (Danny Skinner) is toting a basket, adorned in fairytale style with a red-checked table cloth, containing gourmet food and drink designed to taunt the pair with the chasm between their existence and the world outside. The seriousness of their encounter, though, is brought home with the topic of language, in this case the use of the ubiquitous racial epithet, one of the few things that is singularly theirs in their bleak world.

The important and compelling theme notwithstanding, admittedly one will find that perhaps the most compelling reasons of all to take in Pass Over are the three wildly impressive performances. Johnson and Brown give Moses and Kitch a brotherly camaraderie that is part head-butting, part embrace, part loving debate. The ebb and flow of their exuberance and despair has a beautiful atonal rhythm that  echoes the ebb and flow of their characters’ optimism, determination, and strength. Skinner—as ‘Mister’ and in his other role as the stereotypically sadistic policeman, Ossifer—had remarkable control of his body language and movement and offered a comic delivery that was positively, and brilliantly, scary.

Although this River & Rail production of Pass Over at the Old City Performing Arts Center is following the other downtown venues’ requirement for vaccination proof and masks, consider it a small price to pay for catching one of the most compelling and important pieces of theatre you’ll likely see. Simply put, don’t pass up Pass Over. Performance continue this week through Sunday, October 10.