“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Joan Didion’s famous pronouncement fits well with Shadowland Theatre’s newest production, Hansel and Gretel: A Case Study, a staging of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale with influences as disparate as Bertolt Brecht and Sigmund Freud thrown in for good measure. One more thing keeps the story vivid for its audience: The production takes place outdoors on the Toronto Islands, with the cast leading the audience from location to location. The show’s director, Anne Barber, laments the loss of storytelling in everyday life. “Sometimes we live in such a real world that we forget that stories are a very important part of our culture.” She and the rest of her company are determined to remind us. The Shadowland company is based on the Toronto Islands. Although its work has been featured in film and showcased in parades and festivals, it mainly acts as a travelling theatre company, presenting plays outdoors, with a singular, carnivalesque visual style. Stilts, masks, and puppets can feature in any performance; these props, as befits the company’s participatory ethos, are made in part by volunteers in the months before a show. Rather than simply telling a story to the audience, Shadowland is committed to letting the audience’s voice become part of the story itself-although never to the detriment of providing an entertaining night out. This production of Hansel and Gretel, however, is more than just a playful rendition of the Brothers Grimm’s tale. The production incorporates songs from Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, with some of the lyrics reworked. Sigmund Freud appears, and joins in the proceedings as well, emphasizing how only children really get the story’s metaphorical key: It is an adult, after all, who gets pushed into the oven by children at the end. The character of the raven, who acts as narrator, brings an element of aboriginal culture into the fray. The hodge-podge of elements turn the fable into a story without time and place. Hansel and Gretel‘s coming of age story, meanwhile, is given a political bent worthy of Brecht. The show, Barber says, is about “what happens when people are in their darkest hour” and must resort to their basest behaviour. The job fair that Hansel and Gretel attend with their parents before getting lost in the woods is a chilling but still humorous transformation of the original story. “We all live under the market’s thunder,” sing the employers to the audience, now turned into desperate job seekers. The tale’s ending – that moment where the two children begin to grow up and find the “inner strength and ability to make change” – is one part catharsis, and one part political statement. In its wake, the band parades the audience back to where the play started: the Ward’s Island dock with its idyllic view of the Toronto skyline – a view that, as Barber says, is not unlike staring at a big, glittering gingerbread house. It’s now reimagined as a city full of dreams, imagination, and fairy tales. A city that, no matter what is to become of it, needs us to have our Hansel and Gretel moment and take charge. Hansel and Gretel: A Case Study runs until Sunday, August 14. Shows start at 8 PM at the Ward’s Island dock. The show begins right as the 7:45 PM ferry arrives.