Stop killing us! Stop killing us!” Should you happen to miss either the agit or the prop in Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s insipid play Pass Over (at the August Wilson Theatre through October 10), Nwandu arranges to have her characters assert, re-assert, and on occasion even shout out her themes, which amount to brazen misinformation in the form of theater. Directed by Danya Taymor, Pass Over is the first play either to open or re-open on Broadway since the pandemic began, and to the extent it indicates theater has become a sort of beach ball being batted around by a mindless mob like the ones that rampaged across the country in the summer of 2020, it seems to herald a tiresome season. Of course the play is being hailed as a masterpiece. How could circumstances be otherwise? The principal goal of the critical profession is to protect its own employability by begging for favor from the mob. If a play by a black artist should be deemed to sharply rebuke racism, no matter how blunt, strident, didactic, dull, and conceptually erroneous it may be, few critics who would like to continue drawing their pay envelope will dare note its flaws. I’m not speaking theoretically, by the way; when the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago put on Pass Over in 2017, Hedy Weiss, a veteran critic of thirty-four years for the Chicago Sun-Times, dismissed it and its underlying premises in a review and was attacked as a racist on