The Shape of Home: Songs in Search of Al Purdy at Crow’s Theatre (a Festival Players Production)
Photo by Dahlia Katz
Poets are solitary creatures. They endlessly toil away at the same few lines, which, once printed, themselves seem lonely, threatened by the consuming aura of the otherwise blank page.
But theatre is deeply, unshakably collaborative. This difference might be why the Festival Players’ The Shape of Home: Songs in Search of Al Purdy, now playing at Crow’s Theatre, feels so layered. The show takes material created in isolation — the poems of Al Purdy — and sets it to collaboratively-written music by Frank Cox-O’Connell, Beau Dixon, Hailey Gillis, Marni Jackson, Raha Javanfar, and Andrew Penner. All but Jackson, who is the dramaturg, perform; Cox-O’Connell also directs. And as the show self-reflexively explains, these songs were written over Zoom — which adds even more complexity to show’s unique cocktail of collaboration and isolation.
Also: it’s not boring. Not at all. The name Al Purdy may strike terror in the hearts of the poetry adverse, and no genre has a duller name than “song cycle”, but fear not: Purdy’s words work perfectly as lyrics, and this is barely a song cycle — it’s more a theatrical rock concert, or a jamboree.
The five performers self-accompany on at least fifteen different instruments, which hang on the wooden back wall of Steve Lucas’s set when not in use. The show’s go-to sound is hearty, full-chested folk rock — so acoustic guitar, piano, and drums get the most play time. But there are also short trips into poppier, jazzier, and more orchestral idioms, which provide opportunities for tubas, violins, and the like.
Fans of the hit Crow’s production of Ghost Quartet — which Dixon, Gillis, and Penner were in — won’t be surprised to hear that these lush orchestrations are matched with equally lush harmonies. Often, the accompaniment cuts out, we’re left with five-part acapella, and — thanks to Steáfán Hannigan’s reverb-heavy sound design — the Crow’s Studio Theatre is engulfed in a glorious haze of overtones.
Like many Canadians, Purdy was apparently a bit of a self-deprecator, and The Shape of Home slyly includes a bit of that shyness in its structure. Though the show’s music is consistently exciting, and often deeply moving, the audience is given no chance to applaud until the very end. This technique is fairly common to post-Come From Away Canadian musicals, but here, it’s taken one step further, and many of the songs are not even allowed to properly end; instead, a sharp percussion hit abruptly cuts them off, and the next scene instantly begins.
Because, yes, there are scenes — sort of. The show chronologically covers Purdy’s life through a serious of first-person statements split between the five performers. But I get the sense the show is only tangentially interested in telling Purdy’s story: what really matters is how he describes his life. After all, these first-person statements, which seem to be taken from letters or memoirs, aren’t inherently more truthful than his poems; in some ways, I’m sure they’re even less so. As the show’s title suggests, we remain “in search” of Purdy — like most authors, we never quite know him: just his words.
But analyzing The Shape of Home’s scenes seems besides the point. Perhaps because it’s a commissioned piece, the show knows exactly what it wants to be — a soul-stirring theatrical concert — and delivers exactly that. In less than ninety minutes.
As autumn rolls into Toronto, the cozy cottage-core aesthetic of The Shape of Home seems like an ideal escape from the cooling weather. Add in its pulsing, whiskey-soaked score, and you’ve got a Purdy damn perfect theatrical experience.