My Huron County Odyssey Lands at Shaw’s “Off-Island Odyssey” – front mezz junkies, Theater News

The Ontario Theatre Review: Justin Shaw’s Off-Island Odyssey turns leaving home, getting lost, and finding your way back into a hilarious and big-hearted Blyth Festival adventure

By Ross

In a bit of a surprising twist, my own Huron County summer odyssey was bookended by two Blyth Festival openings with a stretch of Lake Huron between them, wandering the shoreline and taking in the particular pleasure of being somewhere that feels both close to home and wonderfully removed from it. Then, on my last night, I wandered into Justin Shaw’s one-man Off-Island Odyssey, and suddenly found myself spending two gloriously fun hours with this gentle-souled comedian. He is a performer overflowing with honesty, carrying a whole heap of great stories to tell in that small suitcase. Written and performed by Shaw, this solo comedy show is a wonderfully funny and deeply affectionate storytelling adventure about leaving home, chasing an ambition, getting yourself into wildly ridiculous situations, and discovering that home has a way of travelling with you.

Shaw bursts onto the Harvest Stage already in motion, frantically folding and packing as he prepares to leave Prince Edward Island, carrying with him all the awkward optimism, family wisdom, mistakes, misjudgements, and wide-eyed wonder that come with heading out into the world. There is something immediately delightful and engaging about his stage presence. He carries the nervous energy of someone from an island heading toward the enormous world beyond it, with a mixture of shyness, awkwardness, and self-deprecating honesty. There is something recognizable in that energy, and Shaw instinctively relays it all to us with an open heart. He knows exactly how the world might see him and is perfectly happy to get there first. He turns his own uncertainty into comic material without ever making himself feel like the punchline. His humour comes from the gap between his wide-eyed expectations and the strange places his journey takes him, and he plays that gap with infectious glee, leaning in as if he is whispering a secret into the ear of a good friend.

Shaw, the Artistic Director of Storytelling Toronto, gives his “geographical hot mess” plenty of territory to mine, but it is the wonderfully sideways style in which he tells these stories that makes Off-Island Odyssey so funny. The “very strange exchange program” between Mennonites and Islanders, his descriptions of theatre school movement classes, the sounds of Greek sirens at a strip club, and his flipped-on-itself observation that drugs are “tomorrow’s happiness today” all arrive with that same innocent optimism before Shaw cheerfully upends them. Even his habit of putting the word “the” in front of things that do not need it, including “the Netflix,” becomes a tiny linguistic postcard from his small-town home. He knows how to let an innocent observation hang there just long enough for us to follow him somewhere completely unexpected, and his delight in the absurdity makes every detour feel like another discovery.

That wide-eyed optimism eventually carries the show somewhere more tender. Shaw has spent much of his life trying to get off the island, to become something, to pursue stand-up comedy, and to find out what might exist beyond the boundaries of the place where he grew up. Yet wherever the journey takes him, his family and that island come along for the ride. The idea lands with particular force when his father, who apparently smells of “eau de cheval,” asks the wonderfully simple question that sits at the emotional centre of the show. When Shaw tells him he wants to become a stand-up comedian, his father asks, “How do you know you made it?” It is a funny question because it arrives in the middle of all this island wisdom and family eccentricity, but it carries a surprisingly large weight. What does ‘making it’ actually mean when the life you have chosen has taken you so far from the life you came from? Shaw spends the show travelling away from the island, but that question travels with him, quietly changing what the journey ultimately means.

The theatrical simplicity suits Shaw’s storytelling beautifully. A suitcase, the Harvest Stage, a few changes of shirt, and Shaw’s own physicality are enough to carry us from the family horse farm to theatre school, oil fields, apartments, strip clubs, and all the strange stops in between. The journey exists largely through his language and imagination, which makes the physical act of travelling part of the comedy itself. That willingness to turn his own mistakes into stories gives the journey its warmth, and by the time Shaw has taken us through his many twists and turns, the audience has travelled a considerable distance without ever leaving Blyth.

By the time I stepped back into my own Huron County odyssey, I was thinking about the strange geography of leaving home. I have always been comfortable wandering, and leaving has never been particularly difficult for me, but Shaw and his Off-Island Odyssey give that familiar act of departure another shape. He carries a suitcase, a dream, a lifetime of island wisdom, and all the complicated love that comes with leaving the people who made you who you are. His father’s question about how you know you made it suddenly feels much bigger than a joke about becoming a comedian. Shaw heads out into the world carrying everything that came before him, and somewhere along the way discovers that home has been travelling with him all along. I came to the Blyth Festival as part of my own Huron County odyssey, and somehow Justin Shaw sent me home carrying part of his.