We are thrilled to welcome Pass Over director Psalmayene 24 to Studio Theatre. In this interview with assistant director Mekala Sridhar, Psalmayene discusses Pass Over’s set design, playwright Antoinette Nwandu’s writing, and radical empathy.
Pass Over tells a story that is compelling, deep, and rich. The language is poetic, startlingly authentic, and filled with virtuosity. This play gives designers an opportunity to design something that is subtle and minimalist and elementally stark. The characters are people who live in our collective American consciousness in a way that makes me think about America’s complex racial history. These characters also inspire me because they’re a reflection of where we are, yet they are also representations of the possibilities of where we can go as a country. This play is special because of how it’s in dialogue with history—theatre history with it being a riff-off of Waiting for Godot, Jewish history with the Passover saga, and American history with how it reaches back to American enslavement of Africans, which I feel is really the engine behind this piece. And that’s something that this country still hasn’t fully grappled with and confronted. So for me, Pass Over is a potent and beautiful way of sparking conversations around the value and meaning of Black life in America today.
One particular influence has been the theory of post traumatic slave syndrome. This theory is based on the idea that African Americans who were enslaved have passed down trauma and certain behaviors generationally that we can actually still see today in contemporary life and trace back to slavery. That's something that has undergirded my vision. There's also this idea of connecting to the existential bleakness in this world that has been an aesthetic anchor for me in this production. This is also of course connected to Waiting for Godot, and the implied minimalism of that piece where the only thing on stage is a tree—in this play, it’s the single lamppost. The world of the play feels spare and stark and somewhat desolate, and that's not only a visual inspiration, but also an emotional inspiration.
One of the most beautiful aspects of this play is how Antoinette historicizes the narrative and connects the story that we're watching to these three different time periods. She's done sort of a high wire act because while she alludes to these eras that are very specific to their own time and circumstance, she also manages to root the story in our contemporary world. Because of the skill of her writing and the way she uses language, she's able to keep us in one setting in one time period, while also connecting us to these other time periods in ways that feel immediate and harmonious with the story that she’s telling.
When I think of the African American experience, I think of a very stark experience that can at times feel like being stranded on an island or lost in a desert, and of course culturally we have created certain practices, art, music, foods, and other means of giving our souls sustenance. These creations that we've conjured, in my opinion, are ways to help us deal with the existential crisis of being Black in America, which isn’t to say the African American experience is one that is devoid of joy or pleasure because all of these things exist within Black culture. But because of the circumstance of how we were initially brought here to this country, there's an enormous palette of colors that we experience as African Americans. And this play does a brilliant job at showing how Black people have been able to weaponize joy as a means of fighting oppression.
I hope that we are able to really look at these two different forms of racism—the covert and the overt forms—and truly ask ourselves: How are we helping or hurting our fellow Americans? And that can be a very tough question to ask because no one wants to feel indicted, and I don't think that this play is an indictment of anyone, but it's a play that challenges a system that we're all a part of. I want this play to dismantle the barriers that audience members put up—the primarily invisible barriers that people erect that separate us from other human beings. I think this play is the perfect instigator to do that—to break down these social barriers, these emotional barriers, these spiritual barriers. I want this play to give us the courage to radicalize our empathy and compassion for people who look like Moses and Kitch. So that whoever we are, we see people who look like them and open up our hearts a little bit. And I want this play to help us to get woke. And I don’t mean that in the flippant sense of the term, but in the moment-to-moment, intimate sense that I feel is necessary for us to be human with each other and ultimately get to a place of love. This idea of love is central to my artistic vision—I’m really looking at ways to get to that universal love.