Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah, right, plays fictional writer G.K. Marche, and Shakura Dickson plays her girlfriend Natalie in How to Catch Creation.Photography by Dahlia Katz
Title: How to Catch Creation
Written by: Christina Anderson
Director: Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu
Cast: Amanda Cordner, Shakura Dickson, Daren A. Herbert, Germaine Konji, Danté Prince, Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah
Produced by: Soulpepper Theatre, Obsidian Theatre, Nightwood Theatre
Venue: Soulpepper Theatre
City: Toronto
Year: Runs to May 17, 2026
Critic’s Pick
Theatre is typically spared the genre-splitting so common in movies and books. There is thankfully little in the way of theatrical “romantasies” or “body-swap comedies.” So it’s interesting to see Christina Anderson’s deeply moving and equally funny How to Catch Creation billed as a romantic comedy. Currently getting a luminous Canadian premiere at Soulpepper Theatre (a co-production with Obsidian Theatre and Nightwood Theatre), the 2019 play soars way past any genre tropes.
Still, the rom-com label tells us something worth knowing; Anderson is taking us on a journey that’s fundamentally gentle. Her play is deeply invested in serious themes – Black feminism, queerness, social justice, Black incarceration, literature and art – but she wants us to have a good time. Her characters have irresistible chemistry, the story is charming and engrossing, and we can rest assured we’ll get the heartwarming resolution we crave more and more as the plot unfolds.
The play follows three Black couples in San Francisco’s Bay area as their lives interact and interlock over half a century. At the apex of this triangle is a longstanding friendship between Tami (Amanda Cordner), a queer professor at a fine art institute, and Griffin (Daren A. Herbert), an introspective autodidact who spent 25 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Now in his late 40s, Griffin wants to have a child on his own, but surrogacy is prohibitively expensive and adoption complicated given his legal history.
Griffin, played by Daren A. Herbert, left, is an introspective autodidact who spent 25 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. He is friends with Tami, played by Amanda Cordner, a queer professor at a fine art institute.
Their friendship is intellectual, playful and utterly real, in no small part owing to Anderson’s clever dialogue and Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu’s seamless direction. And then the actors are beguiling. Cordner is an absolute delight as Tami – raw, funny, exuberant and sharp as a tack. Herbert provides the perfect foil, grounded and philosophical, but still desirous and aching from old wounds. As the story unfolds, he unearths increasingly deep pain in a beautiful performance.
The twosome become connected with a younger couple when Riley (Germaine Konji) shows up at Tami’s academic office unannounced. She wants feedback on her boyfriend Stokes’s (Danté Prince) artwork, whom Tami has chosen not to admit to her MFA program. Meanwhile Stokes and Griffin meet on a park bench, both engrossed in their respective reading, and bond over their love of the fictional writer G.K Marche (Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah), a key figure in civil-rights feminism and literature.
Anderson’s creation of the mythical Marche, her conjuring of both the real person and the literary aura, is remarkable. After encountering the icon through the eyes of the contemporary characters, we meet the flesh-and-blood woman at home with her girlfriend Natalie (Shakura Dickson). Their challenges both mirror and diverge from the other couples’ experiences. As lesbians co-habiting in the 1960s, they can only dream of calling themselves “queer” aloud, which Riley and Tami do with pride. But Marche’s fight against systemic racism echoes Griffin’s struggle against a biased legal system and societal prejudice. The world has only changed so much.
Roberts-Abdullah, left, and Dickson in a scene from the show.
Teresa Przybylski’s minimalist set uses two jungle-gymlike structures that are pushed around the stage to suggest rooms and enclosed spaces. Made of zigzagging red metal, and lit by a strange sphere of fluorescent lights (designed by Andre de Toit), the effect is oddly eighties in vibe, a distracting anachronism considering the play bounces between the mid-sixties and 2014. (There is a brief interlude in the late eighties, but it’s too ephemeral to explain the design). Images from the 2019 Chicago premiere show rotating sets that depict lush period-appropriate apartments (designed by Todd Rosenthal) that I suspect went further in creating a sense of place. In this production, only Ming Wong’s costumes give a unique sense of each era.
Anderson’s writing wobbles a little in her dialogue between the younger contemporary couple, Riley and Stokes. They don’t get the same depth and detail as the other characters, ultimately feeling underdeveloped beside the likes of Tami and Griffin. And, at times, the effort to tie so many disparate themes together gives us more of a gnarly knot than a beautiful bow. Creation can certainly be artistic, reproductive, romantic, political – and being creative can be impossible amid longstanding injustice and systematic barriers. But the play feels as though it is trying to say something beyond this, something it never quite articulates.
Still there is a full gamut of experience to be enjoyed with this play – laughter, tears and hoots of joy. You will fall in love with some of these characters. Don’t miss this one.