Theatre Reviews

Jake’s Gift written by Julia Mackey and directed by Dirk Van Stralen; WhaT,? cocreated by dancer Ron Stewart and choreographer Jennifer Mascall. A Vancouver East Cultural Centre presentation. At the Firehall Arts Centre on Tuesday, November 11. No remaining performances

2From the outset, the two pieces on this double bill are so stylistically different, they seem like they were created on separate planets. But Jake’s Gift and WhaT,? have at least a couple of things in common: they both tell stories about World War II veterans, and they both set up huge challenges for the solo artists who perform them.

In Jake’s Gift, writer-actor Julia Mackey has to play both a crotchety 80-year-old veteran and the 10-year-old French girl who befriends him at 60th-anniversary D-Day ceremonies in Normandy. Did I mention the pair are constantly engaging in Gatling gun–fast repartee? Jake is haunted by guilt over losing his brother on Juno Beach, and through Isabelle’s naive openness, he finally comes to terms with the past.

Although Mackey makes the characters believably flawed (“You almost gave me a goddamn heart attack” are Jake’s first words to Isabelle), the script verges on the sentimental. Take the moment when the contents of Jake’s gift to Isabelle are finally revealed: the scene is so inspired, so visually arresting, that the play could have ended here wordlessly. Instead, we get a trite pledge from our young narrator to remember the soldiers who gave her people liberty.

But there is no denying the emotional impact of Jake’s Gift. With few props or sets, Mackey creates entire vistas: as Isabelle describes a lone bagpiper playing and the veterans wandering onto Juno Beach and staring out to sea, you feel like you are there. More impressively, when an actor can make both an emotionally restrained octogenarian and a playful little girl believable enough to reduce 99 percent of a packed house to sobbing messes, she’s doing something right.

To say Ron Stewart takes a less traditional approach to storytelling in his dancework WhaT,? would be a huge understatement.

The veteran dancer, as electric a presence now as he was 15 years ago, paints an impressionistic, sometimes surreal and burlesque portrait of his father and himself. With four mismatched rugs of AstroTurf laid out before him—each with a different costume on it—Stewart adopts the persona of everyone from his paratrooper father in red-laced army boots to himself at a dance club at 21 years old.

Stewart’s biggest challenge is trying to speak the text of WhaT,? while performing physically exhausting dance. At times, he is so out of breath you can’t understand what he’s saying.

Stewart is at his warped best in the opening segment, a symbolic tale about a cowboy who falls in love with a girl at a diner. Backed by a jukebox blaring resampled Patsy Cline and a video screen projecting black-and-white linoleum and lunch-special signs, Stewart (who collaborated with choreographer Jennifer Mascall) concocts a wild frenzy of movement: when he’s not twirling an invisible lasso or fluttering his hand after a blown kiss, he’s wobbling his legs like rubber bands, collapsing in lovesickness. But the clubby bar sequence goes on too long. Elsewhere, because some of the spoken bits are inaudible, WhaT,? doesn’t connect like it should.

Still, as with Mackey’s work, you’ll get a rush from watching a performer give the word multitasking new meaning.