The gift of the arts
When Julia Mackey takes the stage tonight, she will transform the world for the 908th time. Not just her world but the world of everyone in her audience.
Her split-second transformations, from curmudgeonly veteran to 10-year-old girl to French grandmother to Canadian school teacher, are a master class in acting, the script’s message is deep and powerful but best of all, Jake’s Gift is a trumpet call about why the arts truly matter and always will.
The one-woman show, running until Oct. 1 at Theatre NorthWest, is a loving tribute to Canada’s veterans, particularly those who served during the Second World War and fought at Juno Beach in France on D-Day.
It is a play about war that depicts no fighting and doesn’t even mention guns or bombs. The human cost of mass conflict is etched upon Jake’s face from the first moments he walks on Juno Beach for the first time in 60 years, the memories pouring over him as relentlessly as the waves rolling in from the nearby Atlantic.
Largely written and developed while Mackey and her director/husband Dirk Van Stralen lived and worked in Wells and Barkerville, Jake’s Gift has become a national and international phenomenon over the last 10 years. Their play is sentimental but not sappy, emotional but not trite and is a fierce reminder that our relationships and our memories define us as humans, in life and in death. Seizing those connections, particularly in the most unlikely of circumstances through random meetings, can be life-altering, if we let them. Much like the arts themselves.
Money may pay the bills and keep the lights on but the arts connect us and give us meaning. Cash is king but the arts is the queen of hearts.
The arts are there, both when we are suffering and when we are celebrating, when we are alone and when we are together, to reflect our sorrow and our anger, our love and our joy, back to us in a way we can’t understand by ourselves.
This is the gift of the arts in the paintings, the sculptures, the music, the films and TV shows, the dancing, the books and the plays. They take us outside and inside ourselves simultaneously, to discover things about others and about ourselves in the same instant of clarity. We yearn for the journeys and the discoveries, even if we frame it as strictly entertainment.
Whether it’s to hoot and holler for Vanilla Ice at CN Centre this past Sunday or to cheer on local artists competing in speed painting at Art Battle this Friday night at HubSpace, we gather in community for the show and the experience.
That’s why the city’s thank you barbecue on Saturday for the great work residents did looking after more than 10,000 Cariboo wildfire evacuees will feature performances by Glass Tiger and Barney Bentall, two longtime Canadian artists whose music means so much to so many people.
And how personal will this be for Bentall, himself an evacuee this summer from his Williams Lake area ranch? What better way for him to say thanks to Prince George than to plug in his guitar, step up to the mic and get people clapping, singing and dancing together?
To paraphrase his breakthrough radio hit, that’s “something to live for.”
In Jake’s Gift, it’s not the sound of the guns that lingers in the mind of the old veteran but the music – dancing to Frank Sinatra in his youth, holding a girl close at an English dance hall as Vera Lynn sang, recalling the trumpet playing of his brother.
Most of all, Jake’s Gift is the victory of storytelling as an art form to both explain our human condition and give us insight into our past and present.
That’s a gift that keeps giving throughout the ages, long after the money is spent, the applause dies and the lights go out.
– Neil Godbout, Editor-in-chief