We are all driven to create. This primal urge takes biological, aesthetic, and generational forms: we want to make something that outlasts us, or at least makes a mark.
But what is creation? How does it work—and why does it so often not work? And what would it take to seize its energy and hold it: to catch the lightning of creation in a bottle?
Contrary to its name, Christina Anderson’s How to Catch Creation—now receiving its Canadian premiere at Soulpepper in a co-production with Obsidian Theatre and Nightwood Theatre—does not reveal the formula. It offers something better: a wickedly funny, achingly clear portrait of the act of creation in all of its tangled, beautiful difficulty.
Anderson’s play premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2019, and this production feels like the work finding its perfect Toronto home. Director Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu has assembled a company firing on all cylinders to deliver one of the finest, funniest and most thematically rich productions of the year.
The setup: in contemporary San Francisco, Griffin (Daren A. Herbert) wants a kid. A Black man recently released from a long prison sentence prison for a crime he didn’t commit, he lacks the social capital and the partner (or surrogate or adoption agency) needed for moving in that direction. His best friend Tami (Amanda Cordner), a no-nonsense painter turned administrator, sees absolutely everything that can go wrong. These two care about each other, and they poke at each other with easy candour. The dialogue is funny. It’s sharp. It’s meaningful.
And their story weaves into others. Stokes (Danté Prince) is an aspiring artist rejected by 13 art schools. His partner Riley (Germaine Konji) is a computer technician carrying wounds that have stunted her own artistic dreams. Presiding over all is G.K. Marche (Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah), a Black queer feminist novelist who made her name in the 1960s. In that era, Marche is in a relationship with Natalie (Shakura Dickson), an entrepeneur who is juggling her own creative ambition. Marche’s prolific writing impacts their personal connection and ripples forward through time in ways she could never have predicted.
“Creation is hard,” the characters say more than once. The other side—unspoken but felt—is that creation is everything.
Through these characters, the play examines all sides of the creative act: the compulsion to create, and the energy it consumes; the sacrifice required, and how self-doubt and trauma can stunt it; how compassion and connection can help unlock it, the rush it engenders—and the resulting unpredictable, exponential impacts. Whether it’s G.K. at her typewriter performing an act of exorcism, or Tami setting aside her art to support others, or Stokes contemplating a pivot in his art, or Griffin struggling to dream his difficult future into being, Anderson’s writing is razor-sharp. Character-driven and engrossing, it is often hilariously funny, and lyrical when these heady ideas achieve escape velocity.
The six actors deliver universally outstanding performances—with Cordner’s Tami at the top of the list. She commands our attention with her assertive posture and confident presence. But she soon reveals herself a wounded, if wise force of nature. She contains multitudes—of candour, curiosity and compassion—which she reveals most forcefully in a shattering exchange with Herbert’s Griffin in the play’s second half. Also wounded and deeply longing, he is equally wonderful. He radiates a humility and humour that feel impossibly precious: we truly root for him in his quixotic quest for “a kid”. Meanwhile, Prince and Konji navigate the individual and joint complications of the Stokes-Riley dynamic by taking them seriously…yet holding them lightly. And Roberts-Abdullah’s G.K. anchors everything. Her past creative urgency, which competes with her relationship with Dickson’s stubbornly positive Natalie, becomes the engine that powers all of these lives in the present.
Teresa Przybylski’s simple, fluid set has been built to embody the subject matter. At left, we see chairs and a table, where characters sit to create connection and give voice to their dreams and challenges. At right is a desk used by one after the other for their acts of solitary creation. Above is suspended an angled circle of luminescent rods—red when we enter, and shifting through mixes of pinks, greens, blues, yellows. These hang like tantalizing puzzle pieces of possibility, waiting to move into alignment. And behind the chairs and desk are two movable half-geodesic domes, which the characters move around throughout the show. These serve as portals where big entrances and exits happen, where babies are conceived, and where decisions change trajectories. Andre du Toit’s lighting and Heidi Chan’s sound design complete the atmosphere with elegant restraint.
The characters, the situations they find themselves in, and the perspectives they evince speak directly to the Black and queer experience. This is a hopeful, subversive tale of the intentional—and the fortuitous or accidental—creation of legacy and impact, despite systemic barriers.
Universal truth also pulses here. How to Catch Creation argues that being in the arena—attempting to create what matters to us, no matter how difficult or absurd-seeming; and supporting others as they create what matters to them—is ultimately what counts.
Creation begets creation. It multiplies, refracts, and inspires. It makes better people, and a bigger world. This production catches that truth—in exquisite, aching clarity—and passes it on.
How to Catch Creation runs at Soulpepper through May 17, 2026. Tickets are available at soulpepper.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
