Christina Anderson’s much-lauded romantic comedy How to Catch Creation opened at Soulpepper Theatre, in co-production with Nightwood Theatre and Obsidian Theatre, to a standing ovation. Though the two-and-a-half-hour-long show (including intermission) eventually feels rather long, this enthusiastic response is warranted by just how funny, poignant, and deeply serious the play is about its characters and ideas. For an American play about Black American ideas, How to Catch Creation — which received its world premiere at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 2019 — has a lot to offer its Canadian audience. From its Black feminist ethics to its ideas about making art and living a good life, How to Catch Creation stands out most of all as a bold intellectual and affective challenge.
How to Catch Creation follows six characters — all Black people — across two parallel timelines: the 1960s and the mid-2010s. In the year 2014, Griffin (an outstanding Daren A. Herbert), a man recently out of prison, is eager to have a child, to the bewilderment of his closest friend, Tami (Amanda Cordner), the director of a conservatory painting program, who has fallen out of her artistic practice due to the labour of reintegrating Griffin into society. Stokes (Danté Prince), a painter reeling from the rejections of 13 art schools, including Tami’s, suddenly decides to write a novel in an attempt to take control of his life. Riley (Germaine Konji), Stokes’ girlfriend, sole support system, and a sure-headed computer engineer, is so devoted to him as an artist that she would do anything to nudge him and his dreams into reality.
In their modern timeline, these four characters’ lives serendipitously intertwine via not only their geographic proximity but, more importantly, their similar creative passions for making art and curating good lives for themselves. This shared passion for creation is bound up in another timeline, which follows G. K. Marche (Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah), a fictional Black feminist writer, and her deteriorating relationship with her girlfriend Natalie (Shakura Dickson) through the 1960s.
As the play’s throughline and governing symbol, Marche neglects her relationship with Natalie for her creative literary pursuits. Through Marche’s shortcomings, her inspirational influence in the modern day, and Anderson’s parabolic arrangement of events, the play coheres as a meditation on the cost behind creating something truly remarkable. Any meaningful creation will cost us something, and sometimes it’s our loved ones. And yet every hurt, wrongdoing, and misstep doesn’t count as a loss, but rather becomes constituent of our creation. Marche’s messy artistic life reminds us that serious creation is deeply personal yet only attainable in relation to the world and the people around us. Seen this way, the miracle of creation is not despite pain but intimate with it, and asks of us, above all, a radical empathy for one another in the act of trying to catch it.
In other ways, How to Catch Creation implores us to think about creation and creativity as expressions of love. This love relates to the play’s Black feminist ethics, which director Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu places centrally in her director’s note. Love, the play expresses, can be pedagogical. In the context of the caretaker role into which Black women are often conditioned, the play reimagines such care not as an obligation but as a vital force in the formation of Black artists, creators, and self-determining agents — an intersectional responsibility which all Black people have to one another. Marche’s artistic life, itself an act of love grounded in the emancipatory spirit of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, inspires these characters to create as it emphasizes to the audience how indispensable Black women are to the creative cohesion of all Black life, both artistically and reproductively.
The production underlines these complexities. On stage, whenever modern-day characters’ dialogue and actions synchronize and echo with Marche and Natalie’s across time, Tindyebwa Otu’s direction and Anderson’s writing flow with a mesmerizing rhythm. Teresa Przybylski’s set, Ming Wong’s costumes, and Andre du Toit’s lighting work also in concert to produce a drama that feels transcendent, where a more realistic approach would look and feel plain. This sublime charge gathers most powerfully around Przybylski’s monumental, sculptural forms: a halo-like ring lit in fluorescent colour, and two expressionistic structures the actors interact with in moments of dramatic abstraction like instruments of time, not to move through it but to collapse it inward.
However, in an effort to neatly deliver a happy ending, the play risks dragging on for too long. This overreach seeps into the didactic characterization of Marche who, despite a riveting performance from Roberts-Abdullah, remains unconvincing and troublingly essentialist in her conception of Black love. That Marche’s most talked-about novel in the play romanticizes a couple’s meet-cute at a protest while fleeing the police reads less as utopian than as a jarringly unerotic genuflection to revolutionary politics. Here, the play betrays itself, and I must echo Tami’s later frustration at Griffin’s pious moralizing: Must everything Black people do, even their most private, carnal exploits, labour in service of uplifting the race? Unfortunately, the play loses me when it tries to reorient eroticism — humanity’s most wasteful and anarchic talent — as a productive force for good.
Despite that, this is still a must-watch, mainly for Herbert’s incredibly passionate and deeply vulnerable performance. As a man desperate to create meaning from a life that was stolen from him, Herbert inflects Griffin’s ecstatic personality with a sorrowful anxiety that mixes to create a highly funny performance, and a remarkable lesson in the renewability of our creative capacities.
How to Catch Creation runs at Soulpepper Theatre until May 17. More information is available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Divine Angubua
Jonathan Divine Angubua is a freelance arts and culture critic living in Toronto. Divine holds a Bachelor of Arts degree with concentrations in Political Science, History, and Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. He enjoys any interesting art and is always looking for great book recommendations. As a writer and lover of theatre, he is most inspired by the strangest things.
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