How to Catch Creation a new play by Christina Anderson

Or: What a Wonderful, Tangled Web

Griffin (Anthony Irons) wants to heave a kid. Tami (Lily Mojekwu) his best friend and guardian since his release from prison, wants to paint again. Riley (Maya Prentiss) wants her boyfriend Stokes (Julian Parker) to get into a good, local, art program, to preserve his dreams and their relationship. Stokes wants to disappear into the black queer feminist excellence of G.K. Marche’s (Nichole Michelle Haskins) novels while, back in the 1960’s, G.K. wants to strike a healthy work-life balance with her partner Natalie (Aneisa Hicks). So how then do all these drives, these hungers, these obstacles, link across the gap of time? Under Christina Anderson’s pen, in more subtle ways than you could imagined.

Anderson has a gift for setting her audience right at the threshold of revelation, that places of theatrical surprise which seems startling at first but indeed is carefully laid out almost from the beginning. There might be moments when you think the action is sewn up and done. But then a twist will turn and what seemed inevitable and pat becomes deliciously ambiguous and spicily uncertain.

There is a whole host of sparkling dialog and marvelous lines, particularly between Tami and Griffin. Mojekwu blazes as the quick witted, pessimistic cavalier. Her particular surprise and panic at being caught out in an unexpected emotion is marvelous to behold. Haskins too nicely captures the seriousness of G.K.’s mindset, the love and gentleness she has mixed flapping along behind the kite of her imagination.

How to Catch Creation is a long, slow marinade in these stories. But it’s such a pleasure to follow this elegant interweaving, to spend time with such passionate persons, to lift up black stories at times marked by discrimination and heartbreak but oh, oh so joyful. The play takes just as much time as it needs, and it’s seeming tangential pieces knit together into an interwoven whole. There’s much to laugh about, and much to coo over, in following the threads of these fascinating characters through this fascinating story.