DIRECTED BY STEVEN SAPP SPREAD THE WORD! Regional Premiere September 7 - October 12 Season Sponsors Platinum Show Sponsor Silver Show Sponsors Social Justice Partner Diana and Mike Kinsey Roscoe Hill Abasi and Toni Baruti The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Linda Brotman-Evans Charitable Trust Gold Show Sponsors David Price Shelley Fleetwood and Jim Gusek Season Patron Susan Tucker HOPE vs. OPPRESSION The World of the Play When developing Pass Over, the playwright imagined the play as three layers: each overlap and inform the others. Ultimately, all three can be felt within the play. modern EXODUS ANTEBELLUM america SAGA SOUTH Enslaving people pre-dates the United States itself. The first African slaves were brought to the now-US in the early 1500s. The slave trade thrived throughout the With the advent of cell In Exodus, Moses is chosen by following centuries and existed phone cameras, our news God to free the Israelites from in all thirteen colonies. The and newsfeeds are filled with slavery in Egypt and lead them agricultural South was particularly videos of black and brown to the promised land. After dependent upon slavery. The men and women mistreated Pharaoh refuses to free them, Emancipation Proclamation by police. Thanks to the God sends ten plagues to Egypt. of 1863 and subsequent 13th #blacklivesmatter movement, Pharaoh finally relents and Amendment gave over four million there is newfound awareness. releases the Israelites, only to slaves their freedom, but left them High school drop-out rates change his mind and chase them. without property, transportation, and homelessness rates are Moses parts the Red Sea and the or true equality. high among young black men Israelites walk to freedom while in particular due in large part Pharaoh’s army is destroyed in to the systemic racism that has the water. defined and persisted within our nation for generations. A Note from the Producing Artistic Director It is my great pleasure to welcome you all to our 22nd tremendous years of collaboration at Curious. It is also an Season here at Curious! After all of those years, it still honor to welcome two new Chicago artists to our stage, as continues to be an honor to serve this community through well as a longtime company member. And it is equally an thought-provoking professional theatre and engaging honor to welcome all of you to also be an integral part of cultural communion. Whether you are a longtime patron this important work. or a new audience member, we hope that Curious will be your cultural home! We all hold the future in our hands; what will we choose to make of it? After twenty-two years of producing theatre, rarely does a play deeply surprise me; even more rare is a play that disturbs me. That is what is so exciting about opening our season with Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over – a play that does both, and so much more. Challenging, fierce, funny Chip Walton and disturbing, this is a play for our time that is as necessary Producing Artistic Director as it is complicated and unrelenting. Weaving together the Book of Exodus, African-American history and Waiting for Godot, this is a play that simply demands our attention. And for good reason; our canary in the coalmine is long dead. A look into, An inside peek into According to a recent study by the University of California, Two homeless African American men conservative estimates are that an unarmed black person Passing their time chilling on corners. is 3.5 times more likely to be shot than an unarmed white Stopped and frisked person. And in some counties across the US, that figure Angry and frustrated rises to as much as 20 times more likely. As Werner Herzog Dreaming of a better life observed: “Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany A riff on Waiting for Godot once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would And the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012 kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches.” So allow yourself to take A look into Here at Curious, we work together as citizens, audiences An inside peek into and artists to explore and extrapolate the contemporary world in which we live through the intersection of art by Steven Sapp, Director and social justice. Even when that becomes difficult work; perhaps especially when it does. It is an honor to welcome back Director Steven Sapp to do that work with us, after 13 SEASON 22 | 303-623-0524 | CURIOUSTHEATRE.ORG 3 Peeling layers with Antoinette Nwandu By Katie Maltais, Curious Managing Director crossing the river of Jordan, and to getting to the promised land—from the Antebellum south all the way through the Hearing Antoinette Nwandu talk Civil Rights Movement. When you look at the writings and about Pass Over, it’s clear there the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, is much more going on than there’s always biblical imagery as a reference point. So, it originally meets the eye. This was important for me when thinking about this play and complex play has more layers thinking about these two young men to meditate on the than an onion and each brings kinds of stories they had been told and the kinds of images symbolism and power into the they might have access to, to describe their situation,” said piece in new and interesting ways. Antoinette. “But then also that sort of Brechtian existential dread and questioning—is this story ever actually going to Perhaps this is because the piece come true?” draws inspiration from so many varied places. From her church upbringing to the trial That core conflict – hope vs. oppression – is the heart of following the murder of Trayvon Martin, Pass Over is not only this play, but the existence of so many black and Antoinette’s grappling with all of these influences. Given brown Americans today, something Antoinette wanted to this complexity, she chose to set the play – simultaneously – lift up, especially for white audience members. in three different eras. “On a macro scale, the structure of the play tells a pretty “I had a lot of takes with Pass Over at the beginning, and macabre joke: Let’s say that a miracle happened tomorrow then I finally sort of hit on the combination of talking and a Moses-type figure were able to call down plagues to about these themes in three layers…: the biblical layer, eradicate the police state in the United States as we know which is set in Egypt, of Moses; the slavery layer, which is it,” muses Antoinette. “So, the state-sanctioned murders of set on a plantation—and you can just think of these two black people, people just like me, whose murders are on my young men a hundred and fifty years ago as slaves wanting mind in some capacity every moment of every day, just stop. to escape; and then the modern layer,” shared Antoinette in That would be amazing. A true miracle. But then I’d still an earlier interview. have every other white person to worry about, you know what I mean? All the ones who aren’t wearing a uniform. At “In the Exodus story, the children of Israel do get to the least a police officer announces their power with a badge.” promised land, and knowing how important that story structure and that language has been in the African After an irresponsibly white-centric review of Pass Over ran American community, especially, like with all the negro in the Chicago Sun-Times, it sparked a national controversy spirituals that are biblical in nature, and the references to and uproar. Antoinette responded via a letter that ran in American Theatre Magazine which read, in part: “My 4 CURIOUSTHEATRE.ORG | 303-623-0524 | SEASON 22 play Pass Over… engages a majority white audience in a conversation about the violent effects of white oppression on black bodies…Weiss’s review perpetuates a toxic discourse in which black lives do not matter and white lives TrayvonTrial Martins' murder remain unburdened by the necessary work of reckoning Is there with white privilege and the centuries-long legacy of following a Promised violence by which it is secured.” ChristianLand? Later, Antoinette told another interviewer, “Ultimately, [the upbringing controversy in Chicago] was affirming, because I knew that my play was affecting people and that it was making people Teaching at talk and that it was making people feel things. I think so community often in the theatre, unfortunately, I’ve had the experience college of seeing a play on Tuesday and forgetting exactly what I saw by Wednesday.” Waiting for Godot Pass Over is not an easy, carefree night at the theatre; it is an exploration that will keep you engaged for days, weeks, months, maybe years to come. The layers that are stacked into this piece will continue to unpeel in the moments ahead, revealing themselves at key moments. “I write plays that hold a mirror up to society, that expose the darkness as a means to finding light. This is necessary work.” Indeed it is, Antoinette. The playwright doesn’t prescribe what any audience member should take away from the play, going so far as to distance herself from any such assumptions. Instead, she said simply, “I write to heal. I think to heal myself and to heal any audience member who’s willing to be healed.” To learn more about Pass Over, go to our Go Deeper section go deeper: on the Curious website: CuriousTheatre.org/event/pass-over >>> SEASON 22 | 303-623-0524 | CURIOUSTHEATRE.ORG 5 Curious Theatre Company presents Passby Antoinette Over Nwandu Directed by Steven Sapp CAST This play does not have an intermission.