Passing Strange - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

At the start of Act 1, the Narrator introduces himself as Stew ("Prologue"), openly referring to himself, Heidi, and the rest of the band, and occasionally interrupting the plot and interacting directly with the characters throughout the performance. The Narrator prefaces his story with the description of the initial setting: the home of the male, African American protagonist, the Youth—whom the Narrator also sometimes calls the "hero" or the "pilgrim"—in a church-going, middle-class, late 1970s South Central Los Angeles neighborhood. The story of the Youth's spiritual journey to discover "the real" commences at his teenaged years, during which he has turned briefly to Zen Buddhism, going against his single mother's conservative Christian faith ("Baptist Fashion Show"). She urges him to find God and he begrudgingly attends her church ("Listening is Waiting"), but when he compares the church's gospel band to rock & roll during an epiphanic moment of joy, she slaps him ("Blues Revelation/Freight Train"); he realizes that the rush he experienced was not due to a religious experience as much as the power of music. This inspires him to become more and more interested in music, though he mostly now joins the church choir because of his attraction to its most popular girl member ("Edwina Williams"). There, he befriends the pastor's son and choir director, Franklin Jones, who as a marijuana-smoking closeted gay man turns the Youth on to drugs, New Negro culture, and the concepts of European autonomy and resistance ("Arlington Hill"). The Youth eventually develops an attachment to the guitar, deserts Franklin's choir, and forms a punk rock band with two other ex-choir members, Sherry and Terry ("Sole Brother"). During a bad LSD trip ("Must've Been High"), the Youth abandons his bandmates to their chosen life of middle-class materialism and starts saving money to travel to Europe where he hopes to work on truly developing as a musical artist, something of which his mother and community disapprove ("Mom Song").

The Youth and his mother argue about his travel plans in a satire of the overly dramatic styles of European experimental cinema (according to the Narrator's own description). The Youth's explanation to his mother of what he desires in journeying to Europe merge onstage into the actual journey itself ("Merci Beaucoup, M. Godard"). Now in promiscuous Amsterdam, with its easy access to drugs and sex ("Amsterdam"), the Youth experiences his first sense of acceptance when a young local, Marianna, invites him to live in her apartment without questioning his black identity ("Keys"). After squatting with Marianna and other free-spirited artists ("We Just Had Sex"), he finds he cannot write songs when he has nothing to complain about. Claiming paradise is a bore, he heads to Berlin, leaving behind Marianna, who tells him not to return ("Paradise").

Act 2 begins as the Youth arrives in politically chaotic West Berlin during a May Day riot ("May Day"), falling in with some of the protesters who are avant-garde performance artists ("Surface"). His integrity falters though when he misrepresents his identity as poor to be accepted by the revolutionary artists whom he now lives with, collectively called Nowhaus. Desi, his new girlfriend who is an activist, intellectual, and the Nowhaus leader, tells him that only love is real ("Damage"). In Berlin, though, he finds he can never bring himself to be honest about his background ("Identity"), though he relishes in the romanticized African-American stereotype he has tried to fulfill among his radical German friends ("The Black One"). Desi finally expresses her feelings that the Youth is concealing aspects of his true personality ("Come Down Now"). Meanwhile, he feels irritated by his heartsick mother's phone calls and offhandedly promises that he will come home to visit her when he has time. With Christmas approaching, the other members of Nowhaus suddenly return to their homes and families, leaving the Youth to try to convince Desi to stay with him during the holiday season, though the two consequently fight over their differing views on love and she leaves him ("Youth's Unfinished Song"). The Narrator's self-reflections promptly enter into the story ("Work the Wound"), concluding with the unexpected scene of the Youth at his mother's funeral. With this surprisingly dramatic event, the tone of the play shifts from largely comedic to suddenly heavy-hearted. In the eulogy for his mother, the Youth explains that although he rushed back to Los Angeles when he heard his mother was dying, she died before he could see her. The Narrator and the Youth encounter each other directly and in a serious moment for the first time as the Youth copes with his grief; dealing with the loss of the same mother, it is clear now that the Narrator and Youth are representations of the same man but at two different ages ("Passing Phase"). The Youth, after declaring that only art can correct the mistake known as life, resurrects his mother's spirit through his art ("Is It Alright?"). Ultimately, however, only the Narrator remains onstage; he professes the need for something beyond the real and that this is love ("Love Like That").