Passage has always boasted an adventurous audience but the response to Passage’s season opener, De Novo, showed us that you are an extraordinarily smart, articulate, social justice oriented crowd as well. The actors, who have been touring this show for over a year now, remarked that this was “the most amazing, culturally diverse community with the best questions mobilizing the talkbacks towards rich, complicated areas”. They are in love with you all and I felt so proud of the Passage audience and of Trenton.

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For those who may have missed the show, what I particularly liked about the production is its balance. Edgar Chocoy was no choir boy. Thrown into the maelstrom of a poor Los Angeles neighborhood, largely abandoned by his mother who found him uncontrollable, Edgar returned to the streets and the world most familiar and safe to him – gang life. While the play's perspective is always sympathetic to Edgar (who genuinely struggled to become a normal, sports loving American boy), you can also readily see the point of view behind the perspective of the prosecutor and judge who decide to send him back to Guatemala.

There were “talk backs” after each show, and I believe our audience found them as important as the play. Immigration attorney Aryah Somers spoke at three of them, and brought an incredibly informed perspective to questions from the audience (you can see a video here). In the final talk-back, led by Director and writer of the play, Jeffrey Solomon, several members of the audience came from Trenton's Guatemalan community. One emotional mother spoke about her fears for her 12 year old son and about keeping him out of the gangs. We were all incredibly moved by her testimony.

My conclusion from the response to De Novo is that we should bring more social justice productions to Passage's mainstage. What do you think? Let me know by emailing me, or posting a comment on our Facebook page.