Dance Magazine: At the beginning of Pass Over, the play's charismatic protagonist, Moses, played by Jon Michael Hill, wakes up and flips his hat onto his head.
It's a small gesture, but like all the movement in the show, it says a lot. "It's a moment of such confidence and prowess," says director Danya Taymor. "It lets the audience know, 'You're good. I got you. I'm the leader and I'm telling this story. So you can keep your eyes on me if you want to know what's going on.'"
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Broadway has returned! The first-post pandemic play: Pass Over, kicked off the season just a few days ago. It should be noted that despite it being a commercial play no choreography is featured in the work. “There’s [only] a little blocking,” says director Danya Taymor, the movement is for the most part improvised. While this artistic decision has, in fact, received mixed reviews, she defends this choice by comparing Pass Over to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. This time, however, the Vladimir/Estragon dynamic is replaced with Moses and Kitch (two Black men living in a police state). Just like Beckett’s masterpiece, actors in the story are not limited by their physical surroundings, and this non-choreographic approach grants actors the opportunity to mirror and respond to each other in real time. In other words, the decision is not one of “being lazy” but rather honing in on the peculiar relationship these two characters develop throughout the story and, thus, allowing the actors who play them to immerse themselves in the story.
This article is directed towards actors, specifically, it appears as if this was written for college age actors as it mentions orientation. I would be shocked if any actor who had been in more than one show did not know the things mentioned in this article. I am not sure whether this article would be particularly useful to the demographic of the blog it is posted on. Onstage Blog states it is created for theater fans who are “involved in theater as a regular part of their lives”. I am honestly unsure whether this means theater professionals or not, but I do not think this would be useful to anyone involved more than casually. Making this required reading for first time actors in high school before tech could be useful, but I feel like this gets covered more succinctly in most rehearsal rooms before tech ever happens or on the first day of tech. As the article says, just be respectful and careful and you’ll be fine.
I have always marveled at the relationship between the directors and the actors. When in an educational setting where the director is a teacher, the relationship is clear. However, I have found at CMU and in the professional world that many directors have a philosophy more in line with Taymor in which the actors are collaborators with the director. I believe that having actors run a show for “10 days before…even [giving] a suggestion” is probably a bit extreme though. If I were an actor, I think that kind of process might actually bother me. I assume that before jumping in to those 10 days there was some amount of table work to give everyone an idea of what the vision was. While I see the value in including actors as collaborators and requesting their opinions throughout the process, I think I would prefer for my director to be more involved.
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