In Christopher Chen’s clinical “Passage,” the first show from the returning Remy Bumppo Theatre Company, we learn about a country named X that has been colonized by a country named Y.
And everyone we meet also is identified only by a letter: G, F, B, Q, S, D … you get the idea.
The reason for the non-specificity, it seems, is primarily pedagogical. Chen is writing about xenophobia, prejudice and power imbalances. So when, for example, H (Adam Poss) posits his “question of the evening,” namely, “is it possible to be friends with a Country Y citizen?,” he is doing so merely as a citizen of X. You can fill in your own blanks.
“Passage,” which is directed by Kaiser Ahmed and staged at Theater Wit with some minimalist style, is a self-aware riff on E.M. Forster’s brilliant “A Passage to India,” but is too sure of its own anti-colonialist views to embrace of the most central concept of that work, which is that everything is a muddle. And unlike Forster, a writer whose works pulsed with emotion and vulnerability, this is a very chilly and abstract piece of theater, some fine acting notwithstanding.
In some ways, the show is unfortunately timed. I’ve been writing about how the geopolitical moment has deepened some recent shows (such as “Come From Away”
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and “Solaris”), and the theater also absolutely has a role in offering some relief from the horrors of the news. You would be well justified in choosing an escapist piece of theater at present; but that is to be found elsewhere.“Passage” is asking its audience to engage in a kind of intellectual self-reflection shorn of immediate nationalist circumstances, and, to be frank, that’s a pretty big and pointless ask in a moment when specific suffering is so uppermost in all our minds and hearts. So perhaps you have to see my resistance to this piece in that context and decide for yourself if you are up for what it asks of you at this moment; you may be more capable than I of undertaking the journey to metaphor.
“Passage,” which also features Patrick Agada, Charin Alvarez, Leyla Beydoun, Caroyln Hu Bradbury, Tiffany Renee Johnson and the especially excellent Peter Sipla, predates both the war in Ukraine and even the pandemic; it was seen at Soho Playhouse in New York in 2019. It is a clinical study of colonialism rooted in academic conceits and filled with intellectual characters.
Deconstructive approaches like this — wherein audience members are asked to examine their own identity and personal biases — were hot stuff in the nonprofit theater in the months before the pandemic and the war in Ukraine; I suspect they will be supplanted now by shows that help an audience express its surfeit of pent-up anxiety and emotion in more visceral ways.
The world, it now feels, has spun away from abstract, academic analyses. To quote the great Tony Kushner: “The world only spins forward. “
“Passage” is an interesting and earnest aesthetic and thought experiment. If that is where you are at right now.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “Passage”
When: Through April 10
Where: Remy Bumppo at Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes
Tickets: $35-$55 at 773-244-8119 and www.remybumppo.org