Christina Anderson’s How to Catch Creation is a very cleverly constructed play that sucks the audience into it’s world of shifting relationships and coincidences that, at first blush, seem too pat.  Along the way it explores what makes us creative and what makes us lose our creativity and, interestingly, how that’s related to the most basic act of creativity, biological reproduction.  It’s currently playing at the Young Centre ina production directed by Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu.

It’s structured around three Black couples in the Bay area.  Griffin (Daren A. Herbert) is rebuilding his life after serving twenty-five years for a crime he didn’t commit and now is desperate somehow to acquire a child to bring up.  He’s in a platonic relationship with Tami (Amanda Cordner) which began with her supplying him with books in prison and then adapting to life outside.  She’s a painter and director of an MFA programme.  Stokes (Dante Prince) is a young painter who keeps getting rejected by MFA programmes including Tami’s.  He’s living with computer scientist Riley (Germaine Konji).  They are in “the present”; 2014 in this case.  Then there’s a lesbian couple living in the 1960s; successful writer GK Marche (Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah) and seamstress and designer Natalie (Shakura Dickson). 

The fun starts when Riley tries to intercede with Tami over Stokes’ rejection and Stokes and Griffin meet accidentally in a park and bond over the (by now almost forgotten) novels of GK Marche. Relationship mayhem follows with a series of (maybe) implausible co-incidences that work because the writing is very, very sharp and even poetic and the timing on stage is impeccable.  And it’s very, very funny.  The cast are all first rate comic actors as well as more than capable of creating a distinct persona.  So we get swept along by the shifting relationships, the loss and regain of creative powers and the slow reveal of relationships spanning generations.  And, of course, there are pregnancies that put all the usual strains on sometimes tenuous relationships.  Embedded in all this is a questioning of what it means to be a creative black woman in a predominantly white patriarchal society.  That sounds preachy but the play wears that baggage lightly.  It offers many interpretive possibilities and leaves many questions unresolved.  One’s imagination may well invent many more.  It’s that kind of immersive, brain twisting experience.

It’s also a rather beautiful and effective staging.  The set (Teresa Przybylski) consists of two light bar sculptures topped off by a kind of light bar roof.  The sculptures can be rotated to provide a somewhat different look and the whole thing can change colour pattern at will.  With the help of a few tables and chairs, and Andre du Toit’s effective lighting, it switches very easily from apartment, to bar, to park, to office etc.

In short, there is a great deal to like in How to Catch Creation.  Soulpepper’s website describes it as a “feel good rom-com for dreamers” but to me it felt like much more than that!  It’s a co-production of Soulpepper, Nightwood Theatre and Obsidian Theatre and it runs at the Young Centre until May 17th.

Photo credit: Dahlia Katz