Genesis (Stage 2, The Next Act Backstage Theatre)
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
There are plenty of plays cavorting through the back catalogues of the repertoire (with ‘meta’ stickers on their backs) where wayward characters are searching for an author to give them some existential heft. Genesis, an ingenious new play by first-time playwright Moemen Gaafar is something different. And it brings to 3-D life a question that gets asks countless times a day by playwrights world-wide.
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Can a play work properly, convincingly, if the characters are just mouthpieces for their creator? At what point should the characters throw down the script, take over, and own the play (and thereby sound real and convincing, with backstories that aren’t pasted on?).
The premise is that struggling first-time playwright Adam (Muhammad Khowaja) can’t seem to get into the head of his protagonist Eve (Kit Brooks) and write convincingly for her voice. So in desperation he decides to just hand over the playwriting to her and see what happens. What he might not have expected is that in handing over free will to Eve, he will lose his own.
How it transpires that Adam and Eve end up together, playwright and character (which is which?), in the same fictional Eden (so to speak) — i.e. a pretend apartment with “a few sticks of furniture” and some rudimentary lighting — is the playful, self-referential joke at the heart of Genesis. I don’t want to tell you too much and spoil the fun of this screwy semi-rom com. But when one of them is outraged by the discovery she’s a character and her life isn’t real, or the other one asks for feedback, the confusion is exponential.
The working out of this knot, via notebooks, does get a bit laborious, and abstract, in truth. So does the writerly advice to embrace contradiction. And there are an awful lot of entrances and exits for a short play built into Gaafar’s production. But the two actors give it their best shot — to commit to roles as characters who may or may not be playing characters, and plant their feet somehow on this shifting terrain.
It’s a clever and intriguing idea judging by this first outing. We await future developments, since further drafts are actually built into the concept.
