Passage

Soho Rep, New York City, (212) 941-8632

Christopher Chen’s new play about xenophobia “sometimes feels more like a therapeutic workshop than a narrative drama,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Audience members are asked to remove their shoes before entering an austere performance space, and at times they are asked to close their eyes or told to let a preconception go. The characters, meanwhile, are identified by single letters only: A young woman, Q, meets another, F, as they are traveling from Country Y to one of its colonies, Country X, where the cast grows. “Most of the scenes might be given classroom-study titles, such as ‘Political correctness: annoyance or necessity.’” But two “exquisitely theatrical” moments “explode the prevailing, contemplative calm,” reminding us that the issues of cultural collision that Chen treats so abstractly “can assume a violent, visceral charge.”

Chen’s scheme “allows for some lovely performances,” said Elisabeth Vincentelli in The New Yorker. Both K.K. Moggie and Linda Powell—“as an X doctor and a Y expat who develop a charged bond”—are excellent. But the play “nosedives” when one of the actors announces halfway through that Passage is a reworking of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, suddenly bringing in, unwelcomed, too much of the historical background of that 1924 novel. But the question that animated Forster’s book also animates this play, said Sara Holdren in New York magazine. “Passage is balancing right on the edge of a really terrifying kind of despair”—the idea that true friendships or personal connections cannot bridge divides created by cultural power imbalances. Is that what Chen is telling us? I tend to think he’s not. “You don’t write plays if you truly believe in the futility of human relationships.”