The Shape of a Girl goes far beyond a simple dramatization of the seemingly inexplicable code of silence and tacit complicity that surrounded the sensationalized Reena Virk murder in 1997, on which the play is based. It speaks eloquently and compassionately to a world increasingly dominated by all forms of collectivized and ritualized tribalist hatred, and offers the embrace of trust as the only way out of this circle of violence.
Jewel is also based on a real-life catastrophe – the sinking of the Ocean Ranger, an oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland, in 1982. Three years later, widow Marjorie Clifford, at home in her trailer in Fort St. John, begins to take the first step in understating that the humanity of love, in all of its tentative frailty, uncertainty and promise, can free a life paralyzed and dominated by loss.