Existentialisms: Blackness, Literature, Performance

Two Black men hang out on the street corner. They trade jokes, tell stories, pass the time. From time to time they are interrupted: by floodlights that freeze them in their tracks, by a strange white man seemingly plucked from another time, and finally, by a menacing racist cop. In playwright Antoinette Nwandu’s hands, this Beckettian tale shows us, perhaps, that the racial absurd (Vogel 2022) is not solely an applied or adapted European phenomenon, but an intellectual and aesthetic tradition of its own, which surfaces in Nwandu’s play, Pass Over. The play opened on Broadway in August 2021—the first play to open after more than a year of shuttered theaters due to COVID-19. It had already been widely celebrated, having premiered at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 2017; Spike Lee’s filmed version of that production was released on Amazon Prime the following year. The most striking difference between...