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Genesis (Stage 2, The Next Act Backstage Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There are plenty of plays cavorting through the back catalogues of the repertoire (with ‘meta’ stickers on their backs) where wayward characters are searching for an author to give them some existential heft. Genesis, an ingenious new play by first-time playwright Moemen Gaafar is something different. And it brings to 3-D life a question that gets asks countless times a day by playwrights world-wide.

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Can a play work properly, convincingly, if the characters are just mouthpieces for their creator? At what point should the characters throw down the script, take over, and own the play (and thereby sound real and convincing, with backstories that aren’t pasted on?).

The premise is that struggling first-time playwright Adam (Ali Muhammad Khowaja) can’t seem to get into the head of his protagonist Eve (Kit Brooks) and write convincingly for her voice. So in desperation he decides to just hand over the playwriting to her and see what happens. What he might not have expected is that in handing over free will to Eve, he will lose his own.

How it transpires that Adam and Eve end up together, playwright and character (which is which?), in the same fictional Eden (so to speak) — i.e. a pretend apartment with “a few sticks of furniture” and some rudimentary lighting — is the playful, self-referential joke at the heart of Genesis. I don’t want to tell you too much and spoil the fun of this screwy semi-rom com. But when one of them is outraged by the discovery she’s a character and her life isn’t real, or the other one asks for feedback, the confusion is exponential.

The working out of this knot, via notebooks, does get a bit laborious, and abstract, in truth. So does the writerly advice to embrace contradiction. And there are an awful lot of entrances and exits for a short play built into Gaafar’s production. But the two actors give it their best shot — to commit to roles as characters who may or may not be playing characters, and plant their feet somehow on this shifting terrain.

It’s a clever and intriguing idea judging by this first outing. We await future developments, since further drafts are actually built into the concept.

red dirt / red storm, Second Star on the Right at Edmonton Fringe 2025. Graphic supplied.

red dirt / red storm (Stage 8, Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The premise of this two-hander from the Los Angeles company Second Star on the Right is not without promise. It locates a warring couple, S and Clark, on Mars. And a major source of friction in their relationship is whether to keep moving through the universe and relocate, to Jupiter perhaps, or to stay put on Mars and grow stuff for the burgeoning Martian population.

Nothing about this set-up, however unusual an application of the upward mobility principle, will prepare you for 60 minutes in the dreary company of S (Ashley Victoria Robinson) and Clark (Zach Counsil). In a very long series of short repetitive scenes separated by blackouts, exits, yoga moves, and repetitions of the same on-hold-type musical riffs, S and Clark chatter at each other at top speed and volume, bickering repeatedly about their respective careers and ambitions, until you’re entitled to wonder  if you might have slipped into a black hole in the space-time continuum.

They met, in the Mars company founded, I think, by S’s parents (she was evidently the first baby born on the red planet, to space explorer parents). S’s job is the corporate communications person; she’s charged with interviewing Clark, a prospective employee in the engineering department. And judging by their encounters, designed to be flirtatious and reveal the chemistry that will propel them into a relationship, there is a reason why more dramas (and also romantic comedies, farces, and musicals) aren’t set in human resources departments.

Soon S and  Clark are sleeping together, then living together, then shouting at each other about moving, about things like whether  Clark’s ambitions for rocket travel put him and others in danger (“progress is dangerous”), about marriage (S rejects it as an Earth relic, unsuitable for the new post-Earthly age). The actors drill the dialogue at each other in staccato bursts that wear you down, as an innocent bystander. It is S, I believe, who says “discovering shit is easy” and “building is hard.” And this wisdom would apply to theatre, too.

Anyhow, you certainly hope that S and Chris bail on the idea of re-locating to Jupiter, since a year there equals 12 on earth. Sixty minutes is more than enough.