Collective Consciousness Theatre Gets Cornered

Moses and Kitch are two young black men on a street corner. The backdrop is New Haven, but it could be any street in any city. They start with a game. ​“Kill me now,” Moses says, by way of greeting in the morning. ​“Bang, bang,” Kitch says in jest.

“Man, I got plans to get my ass up off this block,” Moses says. ​“Off this block here?” Kitch says. ​“I ain’t stutter,” Moses says. They sound serious. But they don’t go anywhere.

Antointette Nwandu’s Pass Over — running now at Collective Consciousness Theater in Erector Square through Nov. 10 — is a riff on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot for our times. Beckett’s conceit in Godot is to remove virtually all elements of plot and set and strip theater down to its essentials. It’s almost exclusively two people talking to each other on a stage empty except for a small tree, killing time, with only occasional interruptions. His main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, seem trapped somehow. ​“Well? Shall we go?” Vladimir says to Estragon at one point in the play. ​“Yes, let’s go,” Estragon replies. They do not move, the stage directions tell us.

While not as visually austere as Beckett commanded his play to be, Pass Over traps its characters onstage in the same self-conscious way. Moses and Kitch are two young men who talk about leaving their neighborhood, but make no moves to do so. As with Vladimir and Estragon in Godot, Moses and Kitch seem incapable of leaving, or perhaps something is trapping them there. And deprived of the possibility of forward momentum through action, they — and the play — must rely solely on language, and on each other.

Hemming herself in with these constraints, Nwandu, like Beckett, makes her characters sing. Moses (Tenisi Davis) and Kitch (Stephen Gritz King) speak in the easy, almost hypnotic cadences of old friends with an endless stash of private jokes and games among them. Their talk cements the bond of their friendship. But there’s some tension between them, too. Moses is more serious and ambitious, while Kitch is more relaxed and maybe a little naive. Moses is the leader, Kitch the follower. Some things about Kitch irritate Moses. Some things about Moses scare Kitch.

The tension between them, however, is a small thing compared to the pressures they face together. They both flinch whenever police sirens wail by, as they too often do. And in time they’re visited by a thoroughly milquetoast caricature of a white man (Griffin Kulp) who actually uses words like ​“golly,” ​“gosh,” and ​“gee,” and says he’s headed to his mother’s house for what appears to be a Sunday picnic. The man isn’t afraid to be in a black neighborhood. Moses and Kitch, on the other hand, are a little afraid to be around him. Spreading out the food for a picnic has never seemed so tense. Things come to a head when they start talking about the n‑word, which Moses and Kitch use constantly as a term of endearment to each other. The white man asks them if they say it all the time, why can’t he? It’s not really his word to use, Moses explains.

“Everything’s mine!” the white man shouts, and is soon on his merry way, leaving Moses and Kitch shaken. And in time, we get to see their fears of the police are all too well-founded.

With Pass Over, director Jenny Nelson has once again found a play nearly perfect for the little theater in Erector Square. David Sepulveda’s set design and Jamie Burnett’s lighting make the space feel both like a specific street and like a stand-in for any place, the lights taking on a hint of interrogation now and again. As the men caught in the spotlights, Davis and King are marvelous together, effortlessly bouncing lines off one another and using every inch of the stage, whether it’s to portray their vulnerable isolation or stage a mock kung-fu battle. Both also know how make their emotions turn on a dime, particularly when their looseness and bravado when they’re alone flips on its head into fearful defensiveness when either of Kulp’s characters show up. As for Kulp, he uncannily infuses the hapless white man with a sense of underlying menace that then comes to full, putrid flower when he returns playing the cop.

In making the Beckettian condition of undefined dread something much more specific and tangible, Nwandu’s script nimbly departs from Beckett’s world and makes one of her own — a situation she takes full advantage of when, in the final third of the play, a lot of things quite suddenly start to happen. The results are uplifting and heartwrenching, absurd and all too real, and mark another triumph for Collective Consciousness Theater, a small stage that continues to take big risks that keep paying off.

Pass Over runs at Collective Consciousness Theatre, 319 Peck St. in Erector Square, through Nov. 10. Visit the theater’s website for tickets and more information.