Woods allows ambivalence to complicate her stories so they cannot be reduced to rhetoric, though they remain staunchly political.
The female narrator of “Take the Way Home That Leads Back to Sullivan Street” gets free rent in exchange for being the girlfriend of a “rich, straight girl.” The story shows how the deck is stacked: the wealthier character gains social capital by dating a woman, whereas the narrator loses what meager financial support she had from her parents for doing the same. But the narrator maintains agency-after all, she chose the relationship, and it facilitates her drug habit. The narrator’s girlfriend evolves into an antagonist, but she is humanized by her battle with mental illness and merciless pressure from her family to excel.Įspecially for readers unfamiliar with her previous work in The Albino Album, which addresses racism head on, Woods’s foregrounding of issues related to class, gender, and sexual orientation might seem to come at the expense of their intersection with race. While dialect marks some characters’ speech, one cannot be sure if this is a mark of race, class, or regional background. We can also celebrate our strength and grace and uncanny wisdom.It is possible that Woods obscures her characters’ race in order to draw attention to its status as a social construct, as writers such as Jeanette Winterson have done with gender. The show reminded me that even when I feel there is nothing more any of us can say about our collective grief for the fragility of Black life, there can be a way forward. In the days since I saw “Pass Over,” I have been thinking about the play’s power, how it reached inside me and opened up a well of grief that continues to deepen. “Pass Over” is absurdist, but so are the conditions of this world - the conditions my brother Joel faced, the conditions far too many of us face. They are being confronted by the fragility of their Black lives and the existential terror that is always hounding them. It is fitting that we, the audience, are held in place for 95 minutes, much in the way that Moses and Kitch are held in their own unforgiving place.Įvery so often, the characters freeze, trembling in fear, and we know why, all too well.
There is no intermission in “Pass Over ,” which means there is no respite from the relentless, sometimes frenetic dialogue, the actors bounding back and forth across the stage, saying “nigga” in a hundred different ways to express a hundred different emotions. But he needed to believe that he and his child were not trapped in an impossible place. He never made himself smaller in the ways the world expected him to. It is not likely that these gestures could prevent the tragedies he feared most - tragedies that happen daily in America, even if they don’t make headlines - but I think my brother needed to feel a semblance of control in a world where so much was beyond his control. He told them the makes and models of the cars that he and his son drove. “This is my child take a good look at him,” he would say, trying to ensure that the officers would see my nephew, this young Black man, as a human being rather than a target. The world was a larger, better place with Joel in it, but even he could not escape the realities with which all Black men must contend - the realities that limited possibilities for Moses and Kitch in “Pass Over.” Whenever Joel moved to a new city, he introduced himself and his son to the local police. At his funeral, we met a dozen people who introduced themselves as Joel’s best friend. He was my mom’s best friend, my dad’s best friend. We argued, a lot, and still he was my biggest fan.
He was loud and gregarious and arrogant and generous. He loved to cook and could have been a chef.