For director Vin Shambry, Pass Over is an onion of many flavors, each layer different from the last.

“There are layers of our current reality, the past, racism, the Civil Rights struggle, suicide, police violence, and even the Bible, and then” — and Shambry places special emphasis on this — “there is also Black man on man friendship. When you see this play what you’re going to see is Black people releasing and having a great time, under hard circumstances, yes, but knowing that they have each other and they have this place. They made this section of the block for themselves. We’re much more than our trauma. This is a beautiful, motivating story about people finding themselves”

Pass Over is a co-production of the Historic Alberta House and Portland’s resident Irish theater company, Corrib Theatre. It was written by Antoinette Nwandu, a recipient of the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award and the Negro Ensemble Company’s Douglas Turner Ward Prize, among many other accolades. Pass Over was intended as a response of sorts to Samuel Beckett’s classic Waiting for Godot, which Corrib presented in December, and is being produced now to be in conversation with that piece.

Corrib’s artistic director, Holly Griffith, first read Pass Over in 2020, in the midst of the social upheaval surrounding George Floyd’s murder. In the companies’ press release, Griffith states that she read the play “out of a sense of duty, and probably out of a sense of guilt — that creeping feeling lots of white people have when Black folks express their anger and sorrow. A closer look at some of the most brutal police forces in the U.S. will belie a heavy Irish American presence. Whether the Irish officers are ‘good cops’ or ‘bad cops’ isn’t the point. The point is, Irish and Irish-American people come from a legacy of being brutalized by the forces of colonialism, and it would put to shame our ancestors’ fight for freedom if we didn’t examine our cultural complicity in the subjugation and abuse of another community.” 

Over the past couple of years Corrib and Alberta House have developed a blossoming creative relationship. Corrib has produced at Alberta House a few times, including the dazzling From a Hole in the Ground last year. Pass Over was the logical next step in this collaboration. “This project is relationship-based,” says Shambry. “This is myself and the amazing (Alberta House managing director) Matthew Kerrigan and Holly always being in communication. She loved this play but she felt she shouldn’t be the director. So, basically, she was like, ‘Vin, I think you should do this.’” 

For Shambry, it’s a natural progression. A Portland native, Shambry is one of Portland’s most accomplished actors. He’s performed on Broadway as Tom Collins in Rent, he was a cultural envoy to Egypt in 2019, and he’s recently made a film, Outdoor School, that he also wrote, about his real life growing up with housing insecurity.

In light of that, directing Pass Over seems almost obvious. It’s not hard to draw a straight line between much of what Shambry has overcome in his own life experience and Pass Over, but for him, that doesn’t mean it’s all pain and suffering. “What Antoinette (Nwandu) is saying with this text is, ‘Look at who we are. The promised land is within ourselves.”  

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Like Godot, Pass Over centers on two men, Moses (played by rising star Emmanuel Davis) and Kitch (played by Nik Whitcomb, artistic director of Bag&Baggage), living, laughing, playing, fighting and waiting for they-know-not-what, who encounter two other men who change the dynamic of the action of waiting, and the energy of the space that Moses and Kitch occupy.

That space is a street corner that “could be anywhere,” says Shambry. “It could be Chicago, it could be New York, it could be Portland. For me, it’s Portland. This street corner is right on Northeast MLK.” For Shambry this is essential theater; the only thing on stage is what’s absolutely necessary. “It wasn’t hard to understand the simplicity of it. We have a tire. We have a milk crate. They have a few things in their pockets. Those are the moments when you rely on yourself, you rely on each other, and you rely on the musicality of her text.”

Pass Over, like Godot, has poetry at its core. “The language is the play,” says Shambry. “There is musicality to it. We get the point. It’s poetry. There are moments of stillness where we know what’s going on and there’s no need to speak and then there are moments of crescendo.” The two scripts are both built on rhythm and music, sparseness and even silence. But, of course, the poetry in Pass Over has one essential difference from Beckett’s text. “To me,” says Shambry, laughing, “it’s so Black.”  

Since she arrived at Corrib, Griffith has been expanding what being an Irish theater means, firmly committing to the idea that the Irish experience is deep enough and wide enough to contain the human experience, from science fiction to the reality of the streets in Ireland to myths and fantasy, and now, to the Black experience.

For Shambry, this is an opportunity for Corrib audiences to gain some semblance of understanding of a community they usually see only from the outside — to see these two Black men go through the same rituals, journeys, and needs that they themselves experience, even though, in the lives of these two men, those rituals may look and sound different.

As an example, Shambry notes that the way Moses and Kitch speak and relate to each other might be difficult for some audience members to digest. “We do it in a way where some people might think it’s dangerous,” says Shambry, “but it’s actually our love language. It is important for the audience to recognize that Kitch and Moses love each other even though they’re cussing each other out.”

There is another facet, which Griffith also alludes to in her statement, to this peek inside Black life that may even be more disconcerting for a predominantly white audience. It was essential to Shambry’s vision that Jake Street, who plays the two white men in the piece, Mister and Ossifer, approach the two characters with what he names “empathy and curiosity.”

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Racism, after all, is usually not manifested in white hoods and South African billionaires. These characters need to be people that the audience recognizes not just in theater, but in their own lives. “I believe that the white character in the play is the white person in Portland who has the Black Lives Matter sign out in their front yard,” says Shambry. “But what they did is they bought it on Amazon. To me, it’s like, ‘You think you did your part. But what you did was create a shield to not deal with it. This play is a great opportunity to shed the shield.”

For Shambry, the needs of Kitch and Moses, though rooted in their individual lives as Black men, are universal. “We all want a little space, a little territory, where we’re not judged,” he says. “Where we can be weird. Where we can dream. Nuwandu’s piece is two brothers in a space they created hoping for something that never comes. Their journey is to realize that they are, in fact, the hope.”

Pass Over

• Produced by: Corrib Theatre and Historic Alberta House
• At: Historic Alberta House, 5131 N.E. 23rd Ave., Portland
• Performances: Feb. 14-March 9; 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays (check for possible weather delays)
• Tickets: $5-$45; https://www.corribtheatre.org/tickets or 503-389-0579