This play had an unusually long gestation period. The story first came to me in 2010, but, as I first conceived it, there were technical challenges which prevented it from making the leap from a story in my head to a play on the page. I placed the idea on the back burner and moved on to my next project. In the meantime I did a fair amount of research on the Holocaust and World War II. Every so often I would come back to the story idea, but I could never quite see how to address the problems inherent in it. There is a wide gap between a premise and a script, and most premises are never able to bridge that gap. Trying to force the issue almost invariably results in inferior work. Thus, although I never completely wrote the project off, I had given up hope of ever completing it.

Then one night in 2017, as I was reading in bed, I experienced an Archimedean moment and, springing up, much to the chagrin of my cat, bounded into my office shouting, "Eureka!" I jotted down the outline which had popped into my head and, within a few days, had a completed draft which, subsequently, required only minor edits. That summer I presented a reading of the piece, entitled Passing, at the Kennedy Center's Page-to-Stage Festival. Its four scenes only ran for about 35 minutes, so I paired it on a double bill with another piece of similar length, a companion to Beckett's Waiting for Godot, entitled Waiting.

Passing was very well received, but due to its length there was not much I could do with it. So I stuck it on a shelf and turned my attention to my next project, a comedy questioning the existence of God, entitled A Theist. My plan was to bring A Theist to the 2018 Capital Fringe Festival, and I set those gears into motion. Then, in March of 2018 I had to undergo quintuple bypass surgery. I pulled out of the Fringe and set my sights on the summer of 2019, essentially postponing my plans by a whole year. In October of 2018 the Tree of Life shootings in Pittsburgh took place. Suddenly, I felt compelled to bring Passing to the stage.

I wrote a fifth scene, which brought the story from 1945 through 1988 and into the present day. And that is the play you're about to see.

We live in a world in which, for the first time since the Holocaust, the probability of a second Holocaust strays further from zero with each passing day. The time for remembrances is now.