Jake’s Gift opens at TNW tonight
Some acclaimed theatre has strung from the pens of local scribes.
Playwright Roy Teed in Kersley has been prolific in his output of comedies, Michael Armstrong’s play In Their Nightgowns Dancing has been performed in Toronto and Vancouver plus the script sold widely in book form, and Charles Ross has become an international star for his one-hander versions of Star Wars and other film franchises.
Jake’s Gift stands with these, and in many ways on its own. The two most prominent creators of the work, the husband and wife team of Julia Mackey and Dirk Van Stralen, are set to perform this richly acclaimed and award-winning show starting tonight at Theatre Northwest for a run until Oct. 1. It is the kickoff to the new TNW season, it is timed for the Canadian sesquicentennial, and it is the 10th birthday for this piece of all-Canadian work of theatrical literature.
It is also all-local, in its recognizable form. Mackey and Van Stralen sat down with the Citizen at TNW to explain the many dots on the page that eventually led to the complete image we’re about to see on the Prince George stage.
As with most plays, it did not start out in an early shape that looked much like the finished product. At first, it looked kind of like oatmeal.
“In 2002, Dirk and I did a mask characterization workshop in Vancouver,” said Mackey. It’s where they were living and plying their actors’ trade.
“They weren’t masks in the traditional sense,” Van Stralen added. “They were really kind of lumpy partial face-coverings. They looked a little like porridge. The challenge is to create a character that comes to you from your impressions of that vague form you’re wearing on your face, then, when you rehearse it and develop it and reach the time for the performance, you take the mask off and in that naked way show the character you’ve been building. It turned out to be a terrible play, but Jules was the best thing in it.”
“My character was an old man, I decided his name was Jake, and when we were done I told Dirk I had a feeling I wasn’t done with Jake,” Mackey said.
The stage didn’t call out for Jake for two years, until Mackey’s attention got caught by a Peter Mansbridge report on CBC’s flagship news show The National. It told of a trip to Normandy, France being offered through Veterans’ Affairs Canada to observe the 60th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. On one hand, Mackey was interested as a student of history. On another hand, it occurred to her and Van Stralen that this old man named Jake was certainly a veteran. Perhaps a visit to Normandy could sculpt his lines more clearly.
“And of course that is exactly what happened,” said Mackey. “Dirk very graciously worked his butt off so I could go to Normandy and find Jake.”
Jake was there. He was in the comments she overheard and the conversations she had with Canadian veterans returning to that place of horrifying violence and breathtaking emancipation.
Also there was a little girl named Isabelle that Mackey discovered among the townspeople of the French coastal communities that bore the brunt of the Allied invasion to repel the occupying Nazis, but were also the first places to be free again. Isabelle was the second character that would join Jake on stage in this yet-to-be hatched play.
The same year Mackey went to Normandy, Van Stralen also took a formative trip. He got recruited to the Cariboo by the late Tim Sutherland.
Van Stralen was tapped by Sutherland to take over his longstanding role as Judge Begbie in the cast of the Barkerville living museum.
Mackey came, soon, too, to play Madame Bourdeaux. In a place filled with musicians, writers and actors she and Van Stralen soon fell in with an inspirational crowd of friends, not the least of whom was Sutherland. On their off time, they put on a version of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and that introduced Mackey to Karen Jeffery, owner of the then-defunct Sunset Theatre.
Jeffery and her husband Dave planned to reopen the old show-house and one of the leading programming ideas for the relaunch was a series of all-Canadian works still in development. Jeffery asked Mackey if she happened to have anything in the works.
“I told her, yeah, maybe I did,” said Mackey. “That was it. The ball was in motion just like that. Karen told me when it had to be finished, and I agreed. It was Karen’s deadline that actually got me to write the piece,” Mackey said.
Van Stralen got an acting job in Chemainus at about that time, so after all the work they’d done together to bring Jake and Isabelle to life, he had to miss the first formative performances. Sutherland stepped in as a temporary but important director.
Another who spotted the potential of the formative Jake’s Gift script, after it was presented on stage at the Sunset Theatre was famed B.C. theatre director Antony Holland who made his Gabriola Theatre Centre the second place to host the play’s performance, and Holland was the first veteran to see it.
Van Stralen soon returned to the Barkerville cast and moved into management. The couple was no longer content to step on Barkerville’s stone as an annual career move. They patiently waited and pounced on the house they loved most when it came up for sale in the Wells neighbourhood. That’s where they reside today, with Jake’s Gift constantly on tour across Canada and even internationally.
“It speaks to a greater truth,” said Van Stralen. “When we go out into other parts of Canada, you see that excellence is everywhere. It’s not just for the big theatrical hotspots at all. If a group of creative people get together and are obedient to the impulse to create, you’re going to see high quality work come from that. We see it in Wells and Barkerville all the time.”
Mackey said Jake’s Gift has been a gift to her and Van Stralen in more ways than just having a hit show.
“Dirk and I have been able to work together for more than 10 years. He has been my director, and that’s probably the least of his contributions,” said Mackey. “We get to tour together, experience professional theatre together, see Canada, and share this piece of art together. And if we haven’t killed each other by now...”
Tonight’s opening is another chapter in the development of Jake’s Gift. Theatre Northwest has given them the rare opportunity to perform the show over a long run, so a few sparse effects have been added, especially some lighting that was designed by one of Canada’s leading lighting figures Gerald King. For those in the area who have seen the play before, it will be an enhanced experience this time.
Jake’s Gift tickets are on sale now at Books & Company or online at the TNW website.