Jake’s Gift a present for the audience

A universal human fantasy is wishing we could bottle a dream and watch it again.

Jake’s Gift performs theatre magic that pulls a dream out into our literal view.

This play, on now at Theatre Northwest, asks the near impossible. It suggests we in the audience believe one person can actually split personalities right before our eyes. It asks us to believe a few shafts of light can teleport us from room to room, even switch continents, without a single physical touch.

It fast-forwards and rewinds us almost instantly, simultaneously.

The art of theatre is built into Jake’s Gift almost as an afterthought. It’s a free bonus that the skill of acting is demonstrated like a clinic. Julia Mackey is the shape-shifter the ancients spoke of in legends. She becomes an old Canadian D-Day veteran, a young French girl, a grandmother, not just seamlessly but frequently. Mackey is both ventriloquist and puppet.

Likewise, Jake’s Gift contains a writer’s workshop for those attuned to plot construction and characterization. If a single word isn’t needed to hold up some other part of the story, I don’t know what it is.

Nothing is extraneous; nothing is gratuitous. Every cup of dirt grows something for the story.

The switching of characters by one actor is not a perfect science. Mackey has been performing this show (she and husband/director Dirk Van Stralen created it from scratch) for the past 10 years.

She probably recites it in her sleep. On opening night, she recited it a bit fast, at first. The transition words between the characters sometimes got lost.

It smoothed out. By the end, heck by the first third, I was utterly convinced I was observing a conversation between a child and an elder. I wanted to leap on stage and help old Jake put that jacket on as he struggled to get dressed for the Juno Beach anniversary ceremony.

I wanted to run on stage and put my daddy arms around little Isabelle when her feelings were hurt. One actor, but so many emotions. Even more than that, I wanted to put my arms around all the amazing soldiers who stormed that beach, that day, and all the soldiers who have ever stormed any enemy position so I could live a life of democracy.

Jake’s Gift is a title loaded in as many meanings as Mackey is endowed with characters. It is a play about gratitude, if there is any underlying theme these stage people wade through. Each character ends up being expressly thankful for a number of reasons, but there can be no mistaking the spirit of thankfulness of the playwright’s hands for living in a culture that allows for creative expression and artistic views.

Being in that room, being an active participant in the theatrical conversation, mixing our audience energies with Mackey’s energies, made it a tearful experience for me and many others.

Expect to weep and bring enough tissue to address this. If the gripping charm of the relationships between Jake and Isabelle don’t get you, the weight of our political times will.

How easy it was to realize, as I watched Jake stand on Juno Beach, that there are Canadians in the houses of power who still say aboriginal residential schools should be seen for their “abundance of good.”

That there are Canadian politicians who use as their election platform the concept of screening immigrants for the presence of “Canadian values” despite that assertion being ironically counter to those same Canadian values.

That there are people in this land who still believe one person’s choice for marriage partner is less valid than their own, or that someone’s gender somehow has a role to play in a person’s future aspirations.

To say nothing of the condition of our southern neighbours. Yikes.

Democracy, equality, the ability to self-determine on one’s own terms is something Jake and tens of thousands of Canadians and millions of global citizens have fought, killed, suffered and died for. It came at enormous human cost and other costs besides. We can’t allow those freedoms to be shoplifted in the false name of conservative values or religious values or creed values or whatever cloak the thieves come wearing.

We must always remember the cloak that our veterans wore when those equalities were established – the uniform of our armed forces, and all those who supported them in those terrible times.

Jake’s Gift is Mackey’s gift – a present of a beautiful, emotional reminder that we can sit and watch plays together, laugh and cry together, think together, because people stood up to tyranny and stared guns in the eye to ensure it.

With Nov. 11 coming so quickly, what a perfect time to think these concepts through.

Jake’s Gift keeps on giving until Oct. 1 at Theatre Northwest.