Review: 'How The World Began' by Catherine Trieschmann
What happens when you bring together faithful believers and skeptical secularists in one room for one performance? You get Catherine Trieschmann’s “How The World Began” a glimpse of how people brought together by circumstance react when faced with a “misunderstanding.”
The play tries to focus on a few main concepts with one being the interaction of a city-living liberal juxtaposed with a rural community and how one unnecessarily treads societal perceptions in that environment.
With only three characters the director, Daniella Topol, is able to try and bring a more personal and emotional connection with the audience.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Heidi Schreck, who plays the school teacher Susan Pierce, is brought to a small town in Kansas which is still reeling from a tornado that has left the town destroyed and many dead.
Susan, herself five months pregnant, is the schools new science teacher. The reasons for her relocation are not made specific, yet it is hinted that she had a falling out with the father of her unborn child and she escaped to Plainview to start anew.
The play’s first scene is in a temporary classroom set up on the now-flattened campus of the old high school, Susan receives a visit after school from one of her students.
Micah, played by Justin Kruger, is a hesitant teenager who moves as if he is unsure of himself in the presence of this unfamiliar person. Micah does not let much time pass to get to the point of his visit, clearly uneasy about the action, but solidly confident in his reason.
In her last lesson Micah points out that Susan was discussing the origins of life on earth, noting that one of the greatest scientific mysteries pertains to how life on earth spontaneously - or not - could have risen from inanimate matter. It is not a mystery, of course, if you “believe in all that other gobbledygook,” she added, according to Micah’s notes.
This phrase is at least inflammatory when considering the audience was a classroom full of young Christians. Micah seeks an explanation, and an apology. Susan’s repeated denial that she ever uttered those words does nothing to quell the tension and settle the situation.
Micah’s unofficial guardian, Gene Dinkel who is played by Adam LeFevre, visits the classroom and brings with him a gift, a lemon meringue pie a sweat gift representative of an olive branch. His motives to bring about an apology are well intentioned as are the comforts he provides to Susan; showing concern over unborn child and consideration that she is new in a small town. Gene does not want the situation to boil over throughout town, but is denied the satisfaction of resolving the conflict.
The play is mildly predictable with the course of the plot set early in the play. With the help of Gene whose southern charm is a comfort for all parties it is still not enough to bring together a consensus and inevitably Susan ends up leaving.
One of the more provocative and powerful moments came in the closing scene and dealt with the duality of human existence, a metaphysical presence entangled with physical life. It leaves the viewer with a thought to take home.
While one can comprehend the themes that are trying to be played out such as the limits of tolerance, the power of language and the juxtaposition of the faithful and not, it falls short in truly resonating with the audience because it is missing key components that would make it a compelling drama.
