On this week’s episode of Working, Isaac Butler spoke with playwright Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu about her Broadway play Pass Over, which draws on the biblical Exodus story, the history of chattel slavery in the United States, and Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. They discussed her inspiration for the play and the long road to its development, the preview process for getting the play ready for audiences, and how she balances writing and teaching when the world is so chaotic. This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Isaac Butler: When I was in graduate school for writing, my thesis mostly grew out of the fact that every time I sat down to write something, I wound up writing this other thing that I was actively trying not to write. Eventually, at the end of my first year of graduate school—because you have to figure out your thesis very quickly—I decided, well, I can’t escape this thing I’m trying not to write, so we should just go write that thing.
Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu: Exactly. You have to have that fulcrum moment where you’re like, OK—and this is one of my biggest creative mantras—the seed of your solution lives inside of your problem.
Do you have projects that you’ve abandoned or things that you’re like, “oh, actually I’ve reached the dead end of this”?
If I had been raised in a suburb and lived in one house my entire life and had enough food to eat and enough money from the time I was zero to 18, I would have written, I’d say, a dozen masterpieces right now, because I’m an idea factory. I pity people who do not have ideas. All I have are ideas, but the discipline and the hope and certainty that the work I put into the world will be well-received, and the sense of self that everything I put into the world is valuable … then I would have been one of your faves already. But I’m not—I have to deal with my fucking trauma. I have to deal with this fucking country. I have to deal with fucking class, race, gender, sexuality, blah, blah, blah. So here we are. I’m emerging, and I’m also really fucking up.
How do you reckon with all that stuff when you’re actually sitting down to write? When you have the blank page, you’re still living in America and its particular reality, its particular presidents, the horrors of its history, but you’ve also got to write a play. Do you find ways to channel that? Are there rituals you do to get into the writing head space? How does that stuff affect you in a day-to-day writing way?
That’s interesting. I think that question dovetails for me into my renewed commitment to deep self-care. I believe that, from the very beginning of my career, or my journey as an artist, until the pandemic, there was some part of my process that could be likened to an actor’s process if they were Method. If I’m writing about it, I got to feel it. I got to go through it. So you just know that writing becomes the slugfest with your own trauma.
It was, “OK, that’s the gig; fuck it, that’s the gig.” Then, the back half of the 2010s, I started going to therapy and getting on the right medication and understanding my own history and reclaiming my writing time for myself. Doing my morning pages for me, reclaiming my love of the craft before the fucking capitalism and career and résumés came on. Remember when you used to just write to write?
Right, not because there’s an award.
Award, money, spite, you know what I mean? Competition. Remember when you used to just be a kid and just write some shit? Do that. Plus the other self-care comes in and it was, “oh, I don’t want to bleed from my work anymore.”
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