Over a career that’s earned her a 2024 Order of Canada appointment, Colleen Murphy’s numerous operas, films and plays have gone on to live lives of their own, entertaining audiences and elevating Canadian culture across decades. But when she creates a new work, like her play Jupiter, she needs help ushering it into the world.
“When you put something that’s written in two dimensions into three dimensions, it’s always good to be around for rehearsal the first time, because some things you think work on the page don’t quite translate to the stage,” says Murphy.
First-time rehearsals serve as the final edits, and the cuts come from collaboration between Murphy, the actors, and director Bradley Moss. The process can get messy, in the best artistic sense, “but when you discover what works like that as the writer, there’s no going back, because you’re in the room — you experience that it works, so you can’t go back to not knowing,” says Murphy.
The characters in Jupiter — the Hutchinsons, a working-class family of five in Quebec — aren’t so lucky. They struggle in a state of not knowing the societal forces that have kept them ignorant of the cause of their plight.
As the only educated member of her family, Ellie Heath’s Emma character recognizes what’s possible for her — medical school — but after what happens to, and within her family, her dreams turn into what could have been.
Like the Hutchinsons, Murphy was born in Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec, and her family followed her father’s mining work to small-town northern Ontario where she grew up with European families who’d fled World War Two. But she says she never writes about her family, and is not interested in judging any of her characters. “I just have a lot of admiration for the working class. And when I say (these characters) are not educated — well, I don’t have much education, either, but that can sometimes lead to a lack of curiosity and a lack of trying to make things better, so they are stuck not knowing what’s to unfold.”
The story unfolds over three time jumps, from 2015, to 2030 and 2050, which director Moss says took a few attempts to figure out how to structure it onstage. Originally, the work was planned as a trilogy, and different actors were to play characters at different ages. “But now, you see Emma, who’s really the central character, at 15, and in her 30s and 50s, and the play hinges on a few moments that really come home for the audience to see that she could have been something special in the world of science.”
In one moment, Moss continues, the audience laughs along with the family during Emma’s birthday party, until a character says something that grinds everything to a halt — “and then suddenly, we’re in someone-could-explode land, and we’ve got to deal with that now. I think that’s the magic of Colleen’s writing, in that we’re going certain directions, and then the carpet’s pulled out, and then suddenly we’re witnessing something very dangerous.”
The heavyweight cast (Brian Dooley, Cathy Derkach, Gabriel Richardson, Ellie Heath and Dayna Lea Hoffmann) is packed with experience, with the one notable exception of a first-time actor who keeps everyone on their toes and constantly demands belly rubs.
“Monk is my partner’s dog, and he was the first one cast,” Moss says, describing the canine cast member as “present and unexpected,” while also serving as another in-the-moment editor who helps bring the script alive “because it’s not the same every time with him. There are times in rehearsal when we’ll say, ‘Well, we’re not doing that line today because now he’s not doing the tummy rub,’ and they’ll have to improvise something else.”
Jupiter runs at the Roxy Theatre, Theatre Network, from April 3 to 20, 2025.
