‘This is what happens when you’re not kidding’: Years later, award-winning Stage Left production of ‘Pass Over’ set to represent United States on international stage

Once a theatrical production plays its last show, that’s typically the last the cast and crew think about it. It’s an “out of sight, out of mind” kind of thing. They put away their costumes and scripts, and make room for the next production.

But when you sweep state, regional and national theater competitions, you have to keep the costumes and script handy for quite a while longer.

Director Malcolm Pelles and actors Danny Anderson, Dahveed Bullis and Matt Slater have lived with “Pass Over” in some form since before the pandemic.

Written by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, “Pass Over” is a modern take on “Waiting for Godot.” In the play, Moses (Bullis) and Kitch (Slater), two Black men, live a cyclical life. Day in and day out, they stand on their street corner talking about this and that, passing the time and wondering if today will be their day they’ll “pass over” into the promised land.

It seems to be yet another normal day until visits from Mister, an earnest, scared white man, and Ossifer, an intimidating, but also scared, white police officer (both played by Anderson), throw their day off track.

The play opened at Stage Left Theater in June 2022. In February 2023, the play swept Kaleidoscope, the Washington State Community Theatre Association competition, which was held in Tacoma.

Stage Left’s production won outstanding direction (Pelles), outstanding dramatic lead performance (Bullis), outstanding comedic lead performance (Slater), outstanding featured performance (Anderson), outstanding scenic design and sound effects (Jeremy Whittington), outstanding light design (Alana Shepherd) and outstanding production.

From Tacoma, the team took “Pass Over” to regionals in McMinnville, Oregon, in March 2023 and then to nationals in Louisville, Kentucky, in June 2023.

“Pass Over” was named the overall outstanding production at AACTFest, hosted by the American Association of Community Theatre, and was therefore selected to represent the United States at the Mondial du Théâtre International Festival in Monaco later this month.

To celebrate this achievement and say goodbye to the show, once and for all, the cast and crew are staging “Pass Over” a final time at Stage Left on Sunday.

The journey to Monaco began with members of the Spokane Theater Arts Council – Josephine Keefe, Juan Mas and the late Sandy Williams – wanting to do a staged reading of a show featuring Black actors and/or one written by a Black playwright. The group asked Pelles to direct the reading and whittled five shows down to “Pass Over.”

The group shopped it around, and Stage Left was the only theater that got on board. After the successful staged reading, of which Anderson was a part, Whittington, then-artistic director at Stage Left, told Pelles he wanted to do a full production of “Pass Over.”

The pandemic put a pause on production, but the team was eventually able to start working in 2022.

“It came out of a place of wanting to tell these kinds of stories in this community, and there was a void,” Pelles said. “I’m really proud to be part of this group that brought this story to Spokane.”

Whittington asked Bullis to audition. Bullis, who is biracial, initially questioned whether audiences would think it was plausible for him to say the N-word, as Moses does in the show.

“There was nerves not from the content of the play itself, more like my body doing that play,” he said. “As we did it on and on, it was like, ‘Well, of course, I’m doing this play.’ It leapt me into a different strata of understanding myself through doing it, which has been not something I saw coming at all.”

Anderson reached out to Slater and told him to audition. Slater had wanted to act in a play for some time but wanted to find a play that featured a small cast and that he aligned with politically. “Pass Over” checked those boxes.

From Stage Left to each level of competition, the audience was overwhelmingly white. Bullis recalls it often took white audience members a beat or two after the final moment of the show to realize that it was over before jumping up into standing ovations.

Anderson, Bullis, Pelles and Slater all remember one production at Stage Left during which a young Black woman started wailing after the final big moment of the show.

“That’s the Black experience of watching this show, since we had so much of the white experience,” Bullis said. “I still can feel that just thinking about it.”

“It will always be a standout moment in a live performance that was, I can’t say good, bad, just the effect of theater,” Anderson said.

After the production closed at Stage Left, the team set to work preparing for state competition. Pelles said competition rules are very strict in that teams have 10 minutes to set up, 60 minutes to perform and 10 minutes to break down the set, which must fit in a 10-foot by 10-foot square.

Any more than that, even by one second, and a team is disqualified.

Anderson said some teams will choose to do just the first or second act, while others edit the play to fit the time limit. The “Pass Over” team reached out to the publishing house with suggestions on how it could be edited to fit, but were met with resistance.

The team couldn’t perform just the first or the second act, and they couldn’t edit the play, the publishing house said. The solution then was to get faster.

Pelles simplified the blocking in places and instructed the actors to pick up the pace and, at times, talk over each other. The show went from its original 75-minute run time to 45 to 50 minutes.

“The first time we ran it through sped up, we were like ‘That’s it,’ ” Slater said. “I mean, we felt it immediately. We were like ‘This is how we do it.’ “

After the state competition in Tacoma, the team was feeling confident heading to regionals.

“We knew we had a good show,” Bullis said. “It was like ‘This is a next-level production. We know that.’ I came to see what we were doing as being a harbinger of this story and forcing people to confront what this story has to say. And it was like, ‘We’re not even competing. We’re showing and then we’re going to win.’ “

They won in McMinnville and again at nationals in Louisville. As the overall outstanding production, they represent the U.S. in Monaco later this month.

The Mondial du Théâtre International Festival is more like a showcase than a competition, Bullis said, with teams from countries including the U.S., Armenia, Finland, Japan and the Central African Republic, sharing in the craft of theater. Something like the Olympic Village for actors and crew members.

The lack of competition takes away some of the pressure, but they don’t want to perform any less intensely than they have been. They also want Spokane to be proud of how they represented the city on an international level.

“I knew immediately this show was different, because we’re all hitting all cylinders,” Bullis said. “I’ve been chasing that for 20 years, and here it is. And look what happens when it’s like that.

“What an honor to get to show the whole world this is what happens when you’re not kidding.”