Daren A. Herbert & Amanda Cordner in How to Catch Creation | Photo by Dahlia Katz
“A thousand people sitting in the dark, silent and all apprehending something that has not been spoken. They all know it.”
I’m very fond of this quote from the late director Mike Nichols. He’s elegantly articulated the magic of great theatre. And it is an apt touchstone for me to express my very meh experience of How to Catch Creation. A joint presentation from Soulpepper, Nightwood and Obsidian Theatres, Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu’s production has some very fine moves and an aesthetic that pops. It’s kinetic energy and colour seem purposeful. It just didn’t help me feel this portrait of creative and romantic life playwright Christina Anderson has crafted.
The characters emphatically tell each other things about art and love and aspiration and disappointment and all the rest of it, but for all their declarations, there is no unspoken truth here, nowhere for our imaginations to go. Using her characters as agents of conflicting wisdom and temperament, Anderson has a lot to say about creativity, leaving us little space for interpretive creativity of our own.
The story is trying so very hard to rhyme its plot and themes, is so fixated on the mechanics of the myriad coincidences it wants us to buy, that it doesn’t find the time for its more practical world building. I had so many questions—not about creativity or love or legacy, but about nagging, mundane details.
How, for instance, do the two dudes support themselves? All we know about Griffen is that he was in prison for two decades. What is he doing now? How can he afford the fancy apartment everyone says is so nice and all that wine he keeps drinking and offering to people? Why is he giving lectures about architecture? Is he an architect? A professor? And Stokes, he isn’t a successful painter, so what is he actually doing to pay the bills? Or is Riley financing his life and artistic ambitions?
It could be that I simply missed some offhand remarks that would clarify these things, but I found so many gaps in my understanding of basic circumstances.
But I, as I often do, am getting ahead of myself.
We have four pairs that echo each other, around this main theme of creation, across dual timelines running in parallel.
In 2014, Tami (Amanda Cordner) and Griffin (Daren A. Herbert) are forty-something friends who both get obsessed with some early twenty-somethings—Riley (Germaine Konji) and Stokes (Danté Prince). Tami, a lapsed painter, is now entrenched in academia as an arts program director. Her friend Griffen, having spent over twenty years in prison for a violent crime he says he didn’t commit, wants desperately to be a father. It’s a visceral need. Riley’s an aspiring musician working in IT. Stokes is an unsuccessful painter who decides to be a novelist after encountering the work of a Black feminist writer, G.K. Marche. She’s a mythic figure in 2014, who we eventually get to meet in 1966.
These folks get caught up in each other’s business through a series of convenient plot contrivances that are meant to be both funny, tense and heartwarming—to varying degrees of success. Cordner and Herbert are the most genuinely persuasive, their dynamic is full of playful behavioural quirks I can imagine they’ve built together over decades. Herbert, whom I have found deeply and consistently compelling whenever I’ve seen him (he often breaks my damn heart!), gets the closest to authentic pathos here.
Running in tandem, set in the mid-1960s, we have the fraught lesbian relationship between that feminist writer, Marche (Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah) and her lover, Natalie (Shakura Dickson, a buoyant, endearing highlight for me, though the material doesn’t give her much to work with), a gifted seamstress.
As these storylines converge a little too conveniently, we see how all of these folks want to “catch creation” in some form or other—by creating art or another life. There is lots of talk about creation and parenthood and love and infidelity and life choices. The dialogue is pretty bogged own in exposition and doesn’t allow much in the way of subtext, but it does have its clever and honest moments. Anderson also provides an abundance of poetic mirroring here, with characters within and across timelines having essentially the same conversation at the same time. It’s a solid device, of course, but the execution is clunky.
There is an especially cacophonous communal fight that takes place early in the second act, a sequence that is meant to feel overwhelmingly dramatic, with emotional and thematic resonance, but which just stressed me out the way loud, chaotic yelling would in real life. I just didn’t care enough about these people, in their various scenes, to have these theatrical devices transcend their artifice.
This goes for the design elements too. Teresa Przybylski’s set looks very cool—a mobile pair of abstract, bright red framework structures reaching up towards a cluster of light strips that are constantly shifting colour. The overall effect is, though kaleidoscopic, rather empty. Other than providing an abstract sense of creativity, it doesn’t ground us or the characters. Andre du Toit‘s lighting gives it vivid, ever-changing dimension, but it didn’t help me to understand these people or their world or even properly immerse me in it.
I imagine there are aspects of Black experience conveyed in some of the interpersonal dynamics. I can’t speak to that, though I can say that whenever I’ve experienced a roomful of intimately coded, communal understanding (out of my milieu), I’ve often found it quite exhilarating. Here, though, any community-specific vibes I sensed didn’t provide any insight and fell flat for me.
Thinking back to Nichols’ remark, I didn’t apprehend anything unspoken. It was all there on the page and in the flesh, so much talk about creation, so much miming of creative activities, so much contrived serendipity… It’s very stylish and frequently fun, in a sit-com sort of way, but it certainly did not earn, for me, its heartfelt finale nor its two and a half hour running time. Your milage may vary.
How to Catch Creation
April 23 to May 17, 2026
Young Centre for the Performing Arts
(50 Tank House Lane)
2 hours, 30 minutes (including intermission)
Shakura Dickson & Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah in How to Catch Creation | Photo by Dahlia Katz