presents
PAPER FATHERS:
Shadows and the Songs We Leave Behind
Welcome
Thank you for joining us.
Paper Fathers: Shadows and the Songs We Leave Behind grows from my own experiences, memories, and questions about fatherhood. While the people and events at its heart come from my life, this is a work of theatre rather than a recreation of the past. Memory is imperfect. It edits, repeats, forgets, and sometimes sings.
The story moves between recollection and imagination, between moments I lived and the emotional truths that emerged from trying to understand them. Along the way, another voice appears: Cliff Edwards, the vaudeville entertainer best known as the voice of Jiminy Cricket. His songs and his story became an unexpected companion in my search for what fathers leave behind, intentionally and otherwise.
At its heart, this play is an invitation to consider inheritance in all its forms. The stories we receive. The silences we carry. The patterns we repeat. And the choices we make to leave something different for those who come after us.
Thank you for sharing this evening with me. I hope you find something of your own story reflected in these memories.
Enjoy the show.
Playwright's Note
Every family leaves behind stories. Some are told around kitchen tables. Others are carried in silence. This play began with a question that stayed with me for years: How do we understand the people who shape us when memory itself is incomplete?
Paper Fathers grows from my own life. The memoirist's journey is rooted in experiences I lived, people I knew, and moments that continue to echo long after they passed. But this is not an attempt to recreate the past exactly as it happened. Theatre offers something memory cannot. It allows us to stand beside our younger selves, to revisit old conversations, to imagine the ones that never took place, and to discover meaning that may only become visible with time.
As I wrote, I found an unexpected companion in Cliff Edwards. Best known today as the voice of Jiminy Cricket, he was a gifted performer whose warmth, humour, and extraordinary talent existed alongside profound personal loss. His music became more than a soundtrack. It became another way of exploring inheritance, longing, resilience, and the complicated ways we leave pieces of ourselves with others.
The title Paper Fathers speaks to both fragility and permanence. Paper tears, folds, burns, and fades. It also preserves. We write on it. We draw family trees upon it. We keep letters, photographs, birth certificates, and songs reduced to ink on a page. The fathers in our lives, whether present or absent, celebrated or mourned, often leave us with something just as delicate and enduring: stories.
My hope is not that you see my family in this play, but that you recognize something of your own. Whether you leave thinking about a parent, a child, a mentor, or someone whose influence continues to shape your life, then these memories have done what theatre does best. They have created a moment of connection between strangers.
Thank you for being here and for sharing this story.
Tim
Director's Notes
I met (writer and performer) Tim Hogue during one of The Gargoyle’s annual “Pitch Weeks” when he brought his play PAPER FATHERS for discussion. The conversation went well and I liked Tim plenty, but it was only after my first read of the work that I knew what I needed to do: that is, not only make sure that it found our stage, but make sure that I was also involved in the creative side of things! I proposed that I might dramaturge and direct this work and – thankfully! – Tim agreed. It has been a wonderful experience, a fine partnership, and I am so proud of the work that we are delivering to the audience.
Ever forward on the grand adventure!
Andrew
With thanks to our Voice Actors
Andrew Davidson, Monique Gauthier, Tim Hogue, Ian Ingram, Connor Joseph, Cuinn Joseph, Ben Krawchuk, and Heather Smith