2025 Fringe Festival Review: ‘Genesis’

Written by U of A alum, Moemen Gaafar, the play Genesis has been showing during the 2025 Edmonton Fringe Festival. Starring U of A graduate, Ali Mohammad Khowaja and Macewan grad, Kit Brooks, Genesis is the story of creation. Except it isn’t. 

The play follows Adam (Ali Mohammad Khowaja), a writers-blocked playwright, who, in an attempt to gain inspiration, swaps places with the protagonist of his play, Eve (Kit Brooks). 

The show interestingly plays with the idea of the writer creating life through their work, and it’s an attention grabbing concept done well. The opening call and response between Adam and his Eve fluidly go along, and the opening as a whole is fun and interesting.

While the Charlie Kaufman-esc writer writing about writing a story can come off a bit too aware, this play kept the awareness to a minimum, making the conscious moments strong. 

Through fourth-wall breaks and good timing, the leads had great comedic moments and solid chemistry. Khowaja’s timing and confidence in his lines even managed to sell the same joke twice.

With the dialogue being good for the most part, and one of the spurring moments of the play being Adam’s inability to write human sounding dialogue, there was an ironic struggle with the play’s chatter to sound real at times. From the 5th grade amount of “fucks” to the lack of rises or falls the average feeling human would have in conversation, it did feel like theatre in that it felt rehearsed. 

This didn’t take from the play too much but it did break immersion at times. I’m all for edginess and the odd curse, but at a certain point, it ends up sounding forced and unnatural. There was the odd alternative swear thrown in every once and a while, but even then, being so used to the fucks, the other swears started to break immersion just as much. 

The play’s middle is lit well and moves quick. The play’s mid-to-end is mainly dialogue. And while the play has a line joking about how the second half ends up being a lot less action than the rest, the chattier leading to the end is just as good as the beginning. 

There’s some more heavily emotional scenes towards the end as well. Brooks’ acting in these scenes had her giving her all, at one point even throwing an apple at her co-star so hard it ricocheted to pelt an old woman in the crowd.  

And the emotional parts, for all their strength, especially in regards to the romance, don’t make sense. But not because the scene doesn’t call for it, there’s just no real established romance prior to. All we really see is a break up between two characters who, for all before and thereafter, weren’t together and never seemed to be. 

But with the characters writing themselves in love, there is some diegetic manipulation that allows for the lack of legitimate build up, similar to the novel of the same name behind Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things. And maybe that’s the point. 

And while it felt off in terms of what was happening, the actors played their roles well and sold the scenes. 

As a whole, Genesis is funny, interesting, and only had a few too many fucks. The comedic moments are great and had the crowd going, the emotional moments are definitely emotional, and the premise had me wanting to know what’s next. 

While the writing was overly-self aware at times, it was still good. Some confidence in the project as a whole from the writer would have left for a stronger show, but that doesn’t negate it being a great performance, and a great play.