Las Vegas Review of Books

Christopher Chen, Passage, directed by Ann-Marie Pereth and Joseph D. Kucan, Nevada Conservatory Theatre and A Public Fit Theatre Company, March 27 to April 5, 2026.

Passage, a 2019 play by Bay Area playwright Christopher Chen, was recently staged in Las Vegas, directed by Ann-Marie Pereth and Joseph D. Kucan, as a co-production of UNLV’s Nevada Conservatory Theatre and A Public Fit.

Blending student actors and professionals, the production staged at the UNLV Black Box Theatre worked between the lines of whimsy and seriousness as it addressed heady topics related to cross-cultural friendships under the pressures of colonialism. The play is billed as a kind of “remix” of E. M. Forster’s 1924 novel A Passage to India,but it strips out all references to specific geographies, nation-states, races, ethnicities, genders, and even proper names. Instead, the characters are given letter-names only—“B,” “Q,” “G,” etc.—and identified as denizens of Country X and Country Y.

The play centers around several relationships between Country X and Country Y characters: “B” (JoAnn Birt), a well-respected doctor from Country X; “F” (Annette Houlihan Verdolino), a teacher who has just moved there from Country Y; “Q” (Sabrina Cofield), a young woman from Country Y who is moving to X to be with her fiancé; and “R” (Ryan Ruckman), who is “doing business” in X. (Other supporting actors play multiple roles and help establish some of the reasons why tensions exist between Countries X and Y.) F and Q meet on the boat to X and strike up a friendship, promising to explore the country together. Teacher F meets Doctor B while visiting a temple, and they bond over their mutual dislike of another doctor in the area. B promises to take F and her friend Q to visit “The Caves,” which are known for inducing mystical experiences. However, in the dark of the caves, Q endures terrifying auditory hallucinations, causing her to fire a gun at B. As a result of Q’s confusion and the biases of the colonial police force, B is initially charged with assault and imprisoned. Although exonerated by the play’s end, B’s experience cannot be erased, and the friendship with F is irreparably damaged.

Chen’s staging directions indicate flexibility of casting: “When double- or triple-casting, it is suggested that actors play both Country X and Country Y roles. Gender and sexuality are fluid. Pronouns within the script can be replaced.” Although costumes are to be used to indicate differences between Country X and Y, the play is more or less designed to be color-blind.

Given the debates around “color-blind” and “color-conscious” casting that have dominated theatre circles over the last decade, Chen’s choice seems to be an attempt to take on political topics while remaining stageable in a variety of playhouses across America. While Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (2015) was initially praised for its color-blind casting that put actors of color in the roles of white founding fathers, the issue has been more complicated for productions that cast white actors in nonwhite roles. To an extent, Chen’s decision to write a drama about colonialism that strips out all real-world context gives producers and directors a free pass. But it also puts his work in conversation with other contemporary plays such as Larissa FastHorse’s Thanksgiving Play (2019) and David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face (2007), both of which dramatize the absurdities that theatre companies face when trying to be culturally sensitive in their casting decisions.

On the one hand, stripping out any actual context related to colonialism itself seems a bit absurd. How can you address colonialism without attending to its historical contours? On the other hand, by removing references to nations and ethnicities and leaving gender flexible, entrenched stereotypes and expectations might be subverted. Both actors and audiences might find new ways to express conflict and reparation.

This particular production was not the strongest work of NCT or A Public Fit. While Chen’s play is explicit about its color-blindness, casting white female actors in the lead roles doesn’t create a subversive effect. In general, the production suffered from a tendency to turn intellectual debates into melodrama. And while Passage necessarily requires the stripping out of cultural contexts, the set design and costumes seemed to engage in a kind of neo-colonial cosplay that made Country X too stereotypically tribal (natural woven-wear, rattan scarves) and Country Y militaristic (cargo skirts, boots).

Chen wants audiences to fill in the blanks and bring their own experiences to bear on the power dynamics, but can they?

Some faulty aspects—as when Professor G addresses the audience directly and asks us to close our eyes and imagine—are flaws not of NCT/APF’s production but of Chen’s play itself. In adopting a Brechtian approach meant to situate the audience in a politically and socially engaged attitude of reflection and thought, Chen frequently hits you over the head with his message rather than allowing the ideas to come through the performance itself.

And in such ways, Chen perhaps misses the point of E. M. Forster’s novel. If Forster, across his works, admonishes readers to only connect (the famous epigraph from Howard’s End), in books like A Passage to India he is an astute observer of all the social, cultural, and historical forces that work against the human desire to connect. In his novels, the class structures, gendered hierarchies, and especially the colonial power structures between Britain and India are presented with clarity and nuance, even while his depictions occasionally rely on certain stereotypes. Without the context of the British Raj (or for that matter, any of the many colonial and postcolonial relationships across the globe), the power inequities that Chen’s Passage tries to stage fall flat. Without a contextual backstory, it is nearly impossible to understand why M and H so heatedly debate whether it is “possible to be friends with a Country Y citizen.” Chen wants audiences to fill in the blanks and bring their own experiences to bear on the power dynamics, but can they? In Forster’s novel, the long history of British occupation and the legacy of patriarchy make it absolutely clear why the attempts of individuals to forge friendships across racial and gendered lines are so charged. In Chen’s Passage, the weight just isn’t there.

In the play’s final scene, Professor G laments the “failure to connect” that creates the “seeds of violence and anger,” and then quotes from the Buddhist monk and nonviolence activist Thich Nhat Hanh, who asserts that “oppressor and oppressed are one.” In their address to the audience, Professor G hedges that the play will strike each viewer differently, based upon their positionality, whether they are privileged or have experienced oppression. Undoubtedly this is true. But the attempt to figuratively drag the audience into “the caves” (rather than out of them) seems like a strange inversion of Plato’s allegory: an invocation to enter darkness rather than seek the light. Given what happens in the cave between Q and B, and the rupture it causes, why should anyone want to go there? In Chen’s play, the characters more often experience alienation than connectedness.