Redemption in a Rewrite

Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s Pass Over is the first Broadway play to open post-lockdown—and she’s determined to land it on a high note.

- Jackson McHenry

AT THE FIRST REHEARSAL for what will be the first play to open on Broadway since the start of the pandemic, the team members of Pass Over are gathered in a midtown dance studio psyching themselves up. Director Danya Taymor kicks things off with a speech: It’s been three years since the Off-Broadway run, and many of them are returning from that production. They’ve always done the play in the summer, she points out, and always during the NBA Finals. “So we’re right in the pocket,” she says. “This project always attracts what it needs and always gives us just enough time to do it.”

“Oh, does it!” interjects Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, Pass Over’s playwright and producer, looking up from her Sweetgreen salad. There’s laughter. They have a whole lot to do this time around. After all, Nwandu is changing the play’s ending.

This first rehearsal is on July 7; on August 4, Pass Over will start previews at the August Wilson Theatre in its—and Nwandu’s—Broadway debut. The show, which Nwandu has staged in different iterations since 2016, tells the story of two Black men on a street corner, blending the clowning humor of