When anniversaries happen, there are presents. Gifts. Theatre NorthWest has wrapped a special one for Prince George, to kick off their 2017-18 season.
For playwright-performer Julia Mackey and director-stage manager Dirk Van Stralen, this year represents the 10th birthday for their successful brainchild. Jake's Gift was conceived in their Cariboo home, raised by the village of fellow writers and actors all around them in the Wells-Barkerville creative klatch.
Jake's Gift turned out to be a wunderkind, walking and talking well ahead of its age. In only a few short years, this play's scope went from local to national and it is now international and multilingual. But it has only made brief appearances in Prince George - rare, singular presentations - even though it was born in the backyard.
TNW gives it the full-length platform it has earned in its decade of almost constant achievement. On Sept. 14, Mackey will march onto the Theatre NorthWest boards and start a proper, sustained campaign. Jake's Gift is the first play in TNW's mainstage series.
"I'm so jazzed about that," said Mackey, well aware that TNW typically produces all its plays in-house. "We've been thinking about doing something like this with TNW for years, and we have talked about it with their artistic directors from time to time. The last one we spoke with was Samantha MacDonald (TNW's artistic director from 2011-14), but it just didn't work out. We were so thrilled to get word from Jack (Grinhaus, artistic director since 2014) that he knew of Jake's Gift and this was something he wanted to program into his season. Dirk and I were so thrilled that it was finally going to happen - a full run in Prince George, and in our 10th anniversary year."
To indicate how highly regarded Jake's Gift is as a theatre event, the acclaimed Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon has also tapped Mackey and Van Stralen to mount the production for them as well, later this season. It has been performed in more than 225 communities across Canada, as well as in the United States, the United Kingdom, and highly emotional performances in France, which forms a major part of the play's setting.
Mackey describes the play as being about a Second World War veteran's reluctant return to Normandy for the 60th Anniversary of the D-Day landings. While revisiting the shores of Juno beach, Jake encounters Isabelle, a precocious 10-year-old from the local village. Isabelle's inquisitive nature and charm challenge the old soldier to confront some long-ignored ghosts - most notably the wartime death of his eldest brother, Chester, a once promising young musician. At its heart, Jake's Gift is about the legacy of remembrance and makes personal the story behind one soldier's grave, she said.
There are aspects of this play not so easy to describe, such as the mystical transformations Mackey accomplishes as she plays the parts of both the aged war veteran and the inquisitive French child. Also hard to reconcile, other than chalking it up to the universal power of the dramatic arts, is the powerful emotions audiences feel through the telling of this story. Most have never been in battle, most have never been to the coast of France where so much devastating tragedy was a way of life. Yet, regardless of nationality, audiences everywhere report being bowled over by the creative impact.
None more so than at Juno Beach itself where Mackey has performed Jake's Gift twice, including during the 70th anniversary of that epic battle involving so many Canadians. As French/English bilingual, Mackey delivered and received in both those languages there.
"I think I kind of had to push out where I was, it was so emotional," she said of those performances. "The first time, in 2014, we were in a venue right across from the house of the Queens Own Rifles, Canada House is the official name, but it has been adopted by that regiment because it was one of the first homes liberated on D-Day and definitely the first liberated by Canadians."
Mackey said she and Van Stralen have been struck by an unexpected implication of the play, unintended, but it makes the upcoming TNW run all the more of a curiosity for them. Thus far, Jake's Gift has required almost no staging effects. The props are minimal, the costumes are necessarily efficient and so it has delivered all its punch through script and acting power, whether that's in a backyard or a church or a gymnasium or a black-box theatre or even at the War Museum of Canada in Ottawa where the performance room was named for a real D-Day soldier (Barney Danson) in the same company written of in the play.
This will be slightly different, because Jake's Gift will be presented in a fully appointed soft-seat theatre over multiple performances over a length of time. A few more production elements than usual can be applied. Mackey is excited by these extra touches, but promises that touches is all they will be. Fans of Jake's Gift have made it clear they greatly appreciate the magic of the sparse staging.
"If you have a strong enough story, you don't need the actual house on a beach. That's what theatre is. You hope to transform the room through imagination. It's so important to us to keep the audiences' imaginations involved in the storytelling," she explained.
She also confesses that there will never be a sequel or prequel. Jake's Gift has been a labour of love and it has succeeded beyond Mackey's and Van Stralen's initial hopes. Those vibrant characters should, she said, be left to the world in that condition, framed forever by this one script.
However, she added, with a mischievous tone, that doesn't mean Jake's Gift can't move about the world in other creative forms. She doesn't elaborate but leaves it to us to consider the possibilities. A movie? A scripted photo book? A graphic novel? Like the play itself, it is delicious to think about and imagine.
Jake's Gift opens on Sept. 16 and runs until Oct. 1 at Theatre NorthWest. Tickets are on sale now via the TNW website or at Books & Company. Francophone renditions are being planned, as are public discussions related to the themes and topics of the play. Those will be announced as they are finalized.
