If you are looking for a new way to mark Remembrance Day this year, perhaps you could visit the theatre?
“Jake’s Gift” is running at Lunchbox Theatre until Nov. 17. The show itself has been touring since 2007 and has become a Canadian darling.
It tells the story of a Canadian veteran who returns to Juno Beach for the first time to visit the grave of his brother who fell. There, he meets a 10-year-old girl who grew up in a home that Canadian soldiers liberated.
Actress and playwright of the one person show, Julia Mackey, says while the story is not a retelling of something that actually happened, nearly every line is true.
She began developing the script and the character of Jake in 2002.
In 2004, as the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landing approached, Mackey journeyed to France herself and met the soldiers going back to mark the occasion, some returning for the first time.
She says many of the lines in the play are direct quotes from those interviews and that Jake himself became a composite of the friends she made.
“When I first realized I wanted to write this story about this generation that was much older than me, I kind of thought ‘Oh, how do I get that voice properly? So, it was a real gift to go there,” Mackey said.
In its many years of touring, the play has been performed worldwide, including several times in Normandy, translated into French. By the end of the run at Lunchbox Theatre, Mackey will have performed the one-hour show 1,102 times.
She says the experience of sharing the stories and promoting the act of remembering is an honour and even though the memory of war becomes more distant for Canadians, human connection of loss, forgiveness, sacrifice, and gratitude is universal.
“There are very few people that come to the play in Canada that cannot say, ‘Oh, there actually is a Jake in my family,’” she remarked, adding that whether or not the person who reminds them of Jake is actually a veteran doesn’t matter, it’s that connection of relationship brings people in.
The show is recommended for age 10 and up, and many veterans have attended. “We’ve just done a show in Taber before we came to Calgary and we had a very special guest, a 102-year-old World War II veteran, a flyboy by the name of Burns Wood.”
Mackey says she met some Calgarian veterans in Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day and hopes to see them in the audience.
The play is one-hour long with both afternoon and evening show times through to Nov. 17.
The show also marks the beginning of Lunchbox Theatre’s 50th season in Calgary
Tickets available at www.lunchboxtheatre.com/jakes-gift