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‘Jake’s Gift’ to make an emotional impact

Play portrays a veteran’s return to Normandy

By Greg Nikkel
A dramatic one-person show, “Jake’s Gift”, will bring home the sacrifices and emotional impact of the Second World War to audiences in a unique way, when the one-act performance comes to Weyburn as part of the Weyburn Concert Series on Saturday, April 22, at the Cugnet Centre.
Jake’s Gift was written and is performed by Julia Mackey, who portrays four characters in the telling of the return of a veteran to Juno Beach at Normandy, France.
The main part of the story is a conversation between the veteran, Jake, who reluctantly returned to Normandy and has a conversation with a 10-year-old French girl, Isabelle, from the local village.
The other characters, who play a minor role in the story, are Isabelle’s grandmother, and a Canadian teacher who brings a class to the Canadian war cemeteries in France.
The story arose from a trip that Mackey made to Normandy in June of 2004 for the 60th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy, and during a week there, she interviewed a number of war veterans. The Jake character is a composite of six or seven veterans she talked to during her visit to Juno Beach.
Another inspiration for her story was that her grandfather was part of the Allied force that landed at Normandy, but he died before she was born. “My uncles and father told me stories that they could remember about him. I felt a bit sad that I hadn’t met my grandfather, so this play is definitely a tribute to him as much as to the veterans,” said Mackey in an interview.
She noted she has performed this play 879 times in the last decade, and so has found making the transition from a 10-year-old girl to the older war veteran easy to do.
Mackey is looking forward to performing the show in Weyburn, which will be the first of a tour for OSAC, the Organization of Saskatchewan Arts Councils, and hopes there will be an audience of all ages in attendance, including veterans.
Audience members should be prepared for a profound emotional experience from seeing this play, said Lynn Kot of the Weyburn Concert Series.
“What did the veterans go through? We certainly have no idea, and there are so few veterans left. Julia did such wonderful research, and it’s interesting to see her change from a 10-year-old girl to an old veteran,” said Kot, who noted she has not yet seen the entire performance, but did see a portion of it in a video clip, and was deeply impressed at what she saw.
The Comp School’s STARS Show Choir will open the evening with a half-hour performance of songs from the era of the Second World War, and the play will be performed without intermission afterwards, taking just over an hour.
“I would invite everyone to come out, from young to old. I know we take history in high school, but really we don’t realize the sacrifices soldiers and their families made to give us freedom,” said Kot, adding the play will make a real emotional impact on all who attend.
Part of the evening will feature a sale of gift button packages, with the proceeds to be donated to the Weyburn branch of the Royal Canadian Legion, plus there will be a presentation of a print at the end of the evening to the Legion. The print, called “Fallen Hero”, is by artist Mark Norman of the Canadian Fallen Heroes Foundation. The artist saw this play, and was so impressed by the message and the performance, that he asked Mackey to present a copy of this print to a Legion in every community where the play is performed.
Among the performances Mackey has made of her play, one of the most special was on Juno Beach itself when she visited there for the 70th anniversary of D-Day, as she performed it in French, and she noted she will be returning to Normandy in June for a week, and will be performing her play again there.
“It was an incredibly moving experience to perform it in France. I make a specific reference to the Queen’s Own Rifles who took part in the invasion, and to be back where I was inspired to write the play in the first place was special,” said Mackey.
She was amazed to hear that a group of students from the Weyburn Comp Travel Club will be at Juno Beach in Normandy just before her performance in Weyburn.
Mackey noted that veterans who come to see her play have told her that they can relate to how the main character feels when he returns to Juno Beach.
“There’s a scene in the play where Jake has a hard time remembering some of the events of the war, and the connection to this part is palpable to many of the veterans,” said Mackey, noting that veterans have told her of the connection they feel whether they were in the Second World War or more recently in Kandahar in Afghanistan.
“It’s an understanding of how difficult it is to deal with memories. Many of them had memories of good times, and it was hard to share about the difficult memories. I got a really good sense of what Jake must have felt like,” she said, noting that it’s important to remember what veterans went through all year round, not just in November for Remembrance Day, especially as now that we are losing more and more of the veterans from the Second World War as time goes on.