I saw the same Steppenwolf opening Sun-Times critic Hedy Weiss saw two weekends ago—Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over, a lacerating, absurdist exploration of racism. The play was genuinely shocking.
It was a startling move by a major Chicago theater against a critic who’s logged more than 30 years—thousands of nights in storefronts and millions of words written on deadline—as a champion of the vaunted Chicago theater scene.
Ironically, the bigotry that’s evident in all this has been piling on in Facebook discussions and other Internet comments (where the worst of her attackers have taken her past words out of context and maliciously distorted their meaning). The Tribune‘s Chris Jones, the critic at the Sun-Times‘s rival paper and one of the first people speaking up on her behalf, has written that he has “been truly appalled by the ageism, cruelty, personal vitriol and nasty threats” online.
