‘Pass Over’ by Antoinette Nwandu (2018)

For Moses and Kitch, poor young black men in a modern American city, the warm greeting “Yo, kill me now” is always answered with a reassuring “Bang bang.” That’s no metaphor; death, hovering so closely around them, may be the only thing they can confidently expect to achieve. If their rituals recall Beckett’s tramps in “Waiting for Godot,” they also reference plantation America and biblical Egypt; this is a tragedy too big for any one era to encompass.

‘Slave Play’ by Jeremy O. Harris (2018)

What at first seems like absurd plantation porn featuring slaves and overseers is soon revealed to be sex therapy role-play for contemporary interracial couples. Though the therapy focuses on the white “blind spot” in which black partners feel they disappear, the play as a whole is looking at something bigger: the dysfunction of the interracial partnership of America.

‘White Noise’ by Suzan-Lori Parks (2019)

Ralph, who’s white, and Leo, who’s black, have been pals since college, each thinking he is somehow beyond race. But when Leo is assaulted by police officers, hairline cracks in his sense of self gape open. To close them, he makes a shocking suggestion: that he become, for 40 days, Ralph’s slave. The experiment not only revises the relationships between the two men (and also their girlfriends) but our idea of how far past the past really is.

‘Ain’t No Mo’’ by Jordan E. Cooper (2019)

Peaches is the boarding agent for African-American Airlines flight 1619 — the one taking all black citizens of the United States on a one-way trip to Africa. The shocker is that the exodus is so eagerly embraced, for reasons demonstrated in this anthology of mostly satirical sketches about racism run rampant. “If you stay here,” Peaches says, “you only got two choices for guaranteed housing, and that’s either a cell or a coffin.”