75-Minute Yard Tale

70 Mile Yard Sale
Charlottetown Festival, The Mack
September 18, 2024

The review title is a smidgen misleading. The show is really 75 minutes of yard tales, plural, as filtered through the mind of Justin Shaw, a PEI-born writer/actor/comedian who moved to Hamilton, Ontario years ago and is reconnecting with the Island through his art. 

A veteran standup comedian who got his start in the PEI theatre scene (notably as an early member of the Popalopalots improv troupe), Shaw has built this show around a unique Island tradition: the 70 Mile Coastal Yard Sale, an annual multi-community collection of simultaneous yard sales that sprawls across southeastern PEI for two days of folksy local colour and frenzied bargain hunting. 

Begun as a TV script, the project evolved over time through conversations with people like Shaw’s PEI theatre pal Benton Hartley and playwright Daniel MacIvor, who mentored Shaw’s development of the show. Shaw also put out a public call seeking people’s 70 Mile Coastal Yard Sale memories to use as inspiration and background material. 

Noting Shaw’s standup comedy background, MacIvor suggested converting the script into a one-man show. Shaw has taken that solo show to various venues in Ontario and PEI in recent years, revising it over time, and the latest version scored a sold-out September run at the Mack as part of the Charlottetown Festival. 

In its current form, Shaw’s solo show has two segments. The first segment is an expertly executed, often hilarious standup routine full of engaging crowd interaction, sly timing and affectionate rants as Shaw riffs on the yard sale, life in PEI, life on the mainland, his standup comedy career, Anne of Green Gables and more. 

That opening comedy segment is aided by the set dressing. Shaw does his entire set from the floor at audience level, but the raised stage behind him is full of tables covered with random yard sale items, and the audience cabaret tables each have a sample yard sale item, too. Shaw and Charlottetown Festival artistic director Adam Brazier bought much of this stuff during the latest 70-mile yard sale, and Shaw wanders repeatedly into anecdotes and asides about some of these items, like a perhaps-haunted doll that may well haunt the audience’s dreams from now on. 

The second segment of the show segues into storytelling as Shaw tells a single long-form comedic story about a young man known as Old Donald Cook who moves off the Island, is brought back to PEI by a death in the family and ends up searching the 70-mile yard sale for a lost family heirloom in a madcap multi-community quest whose highlights include a Hulk-fisted comedic sidekick, Montague’s inescapable Wendy’s/Tim Horton’s drive-through line-up, a low-speed tractor chase and some surprising new pages in Donald’s family history.  

The standup segment is great, but the story segment—which builds on easter eggs from earlier in the show—is even better, a compellingly emotional, captivatingly paced, often absurd narrative in which Shaw pinballs back and forth between high-energy theatrics and moments of quietly moving humanity like some slightly caffeinated Stuart McLean. 

“This piece, at the end of the day is a love letter to PEI,” Shaw told the Eastern Graphic back in 2022. That love shines through in the finished product, a sweetly funny finale for the 2024 Charlottetown Festival.