Jacob James in Chase The Ace by Mark Crawford. Photo by Jamie Kronick.
Jacob James, who originally hails from Kingston, Ontario and is familiar to audiences at the Stratford Festival for his multiple seasons there, spent a busy summer in the Maritimes last year between performing as seventeen different characters in Mark Crawford’s play Chase The Ace at Ship’s Company Theatre in Parrsboro and at The Mack in Charlottetown, and then also travelling around Nova Scotia filming a paranormal investigation television series with Paul Andrew Kimball. During a conversation that we had about Chase the Ace aptly on Zoom, which closes April 12th, 2026 at Neptune Theatre’s Scotiabank Studio Theatre, James noted that there’s a line in the play where a town counsellor says that Chase the Ace goes by different names in different regions of the country saying, “Jig the Joker, Crown the King, Catch the Ace, but around here, we like to say Chase the Ace.” James says that while driving through Cape Breton filming the television series he kept noticing signs for the lottery game on the side of the road, and sure enough, he saw “Jig the Joker, Crown the King, and Catch the Ace” too. It really felt like a moment of the fictional world of the play and the real world around him colliding.
Nova Scotia doesn’t have the monopoly on this specific type of lottery, but as you can see from the Wikipedia Page it does seem to have a particular resonance in our cultural landscape. We didn’t invent Chase the Ace either, the community of Noel is credited with copying the idea from a fundraiser in Inuvik back in 2013, and this organization in Noel was the first to be given a license for the game in Nova Scotia. By September, 2015 about 300 lottery licences had been issued here just for that year alone. It rose in popularity in Newfoundland and Labrador and on Prince Edward Island as well. It really entered the Maritime zeitgeist in the summer of 2015 when a game in Inverness, which had started the year before, had a jackpot reach nearly $1.5 million dollars, drawing huge crowds from outside the village (ten times the local population) quickly surpassing the capacities of venues in the area. The winner eventually won $1.7 million dollars. Similar situations then arose in Sydney and in Margaree, but the situation in Inverness really became Nova Scotia’s own Chase the Ace Heritage Moment.
In the Spring and Summer of 2021 Mark Crawford himself performed this play both online via streamed performance and outside at various summer theatres in Ontario- some of the first live shows to return in Canada still very much during the Covid-19 pandemic. When Jacob James and Charlotte Gowdy, who met when they went to The National Theatre School of Canada together, were discussing the prospect of doing a production of this play they originally had the script that Crawford used for these outdoor productions. “That version is based in Ontario, and all the characters are speaking with Ontario dialects… so I was prepping the script with 17 characters with Ontario dialects… and I was at the opening for The Winter’s Tale at Stratford… and it was just before the show started and I was with my eleven year old son going to the bathroom and we bumped into Mark… this was right before I was about to go to Parrsboro- about a month before- and he’s like, ‘oh, hey we’ll get you that new script really, really soon.’ I was like, ‘uh, what? Excuse me? New script?’”
Crawford clarified that he and Gowdy had decided to set the play in Nova Scotia instead for the East Coast run. “So I had some major adjustments to make,” he says, “but, Charlotte, I love her as a director because she’s a tough sensei, but she’s got a heart and soul of absolute gold… I’m the kind of actor that likes to work hard, and likes to be extremely detailed, refined and specific in my detail work, especially when you have to distinguish 17 different people as one person.”
Charlotte Gowdy hails from Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, and she has worked as an actor, director, dramaturg, producer, musician, educator, and playwright in the Canadian Theatre. She trained at Ecole Philippe Gaulier in Paris, at the National Ballet School of Canada, and as part of the Stratford Festival’s Michael Langham Program for Directors. You really can see her putting all this expertise into practice directing James in this piece. Gowdy’s time at the Stratford Festival overlapped with Laura Vingoe-Cram’s, which is how Chase the Ace came to be performed at Ship’s Company Theatre last summer. Gowdy now splits her time between Charlottetown and France. She also is trained in Kundalini Yoga. James tells me about this concept that she introduced him to called “homo spiritus,” which is “becoming in complete sovereignty and control of your perspective. Your perspective is a choice and it determines your emotional experience in the present moment. So you can shift that perspective.” He goes on to say, “when faced with a challenge or an obstacle a homo sapien would look at it as something that would victimize them, whereas a homo spiritus perspective on the same challenge or obstacle would be ‘this is an opportunity to help me evolve and learn and grow.’ Just since the summer my life has changed. So, not only is she a wonderful director and person… she’s a bit of a Galadriel too.”
This seems like an apt perspective to have when attempting to tackle such a physically and mentally challenging piece.
James says the premise of Chase the Ace centres on Charlie, a successful morning radio show host who is on the national level. When the worst moment of his life goes viral he is ruined and life as he knows it changes. His friend Trent, the anchor on the National News, shows him a job posting for a very small local radio station in need of a manger in a tiny town in Nova Scotia. “He’s got no other real alternative,” James says, “so he goes kind of begrudgingly, and once he gets there there’s a very colourful cast of characters in the town that he gets to know… then there’s the first case of Covid-19 at a long-term care facility and they are asking for extra money to help raise funds- they can’t figure out what to do, and finally they come up with the idea of a Chase the Ace, which would be broadcast on the radio. So Charlie has got a purpose now, and then he starts getting mysterious texts from a number he doesn’t know claiming that there’s something fishy about Chase the Ace, some kind of corruption going on… So, basically what we have is a mystery wrapped in a comedy.” In terms of tone he compares it to the hit Martin Short/ Steve Martin/ Selena Gomez television show Only Murders in the Building (2021).
James enjoys mysteries himself. He played Dr. Watson in Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery in 2017 and says playing that role felt ideal for him. “I went deep and I read all the Arthur Conan Doyle books because they’re all written from Watson’s point of view, so for an actor playing Watson it’s the perfect resource because you get into the head, the mind, and the perspective of Watson… when it comes to mystery, you know, I wouldn’t suffer fools gladly… but [Chase the Ace] is a really sophisticatedly put together mystery.”
“What’s really special about this play,” he says, “is that it gives us the opportunity… to address the fact that we never really had the chance to heal from the trauma of Covid… There’s a line towards the end ‘we had a chance in the face of this big, terrible, obstacle to be better. We could have decided, “hey guys, let’s not elect criminals- no more liars and cheats,” and now it’s six years later, and here we are. It’s almost like a group therapy session. You walk away, whether it’s conscious or not, having kind of recognized and let go and moved on from some unconscious trauma that you weren’t aware was from Covid.”
James says that it was one thing saying these lines last summer in Parrsboro and Charlottetown, but that they hit completely differently in Halifax now.
Ship’s Company Theatre’s production of Mark Crawford’s Chase the Ace starring Jacob James and directed by Charlotte Gowdy plays until April 12th, 2026 at Neptune Theatre’s Scotiabank Studio Theatre (1589 Argyle Street, Halifax). Shows are at 7:30pm Tuesday to Saturday with 2:00pm matinees on Saturday and Sunday. Tickets range in price from $25.00 to $50.00 based on seating. They are available online here or by calling the Box Office at 902.429.7070 or in person at 1589 Argyle Street.
Please note: this production includes some instances of coarse language and flashing lights.
Neptune Theatre has a range of Accessibility Options for folks (Both Fountain Hall and the Scotiabank Stage are accessible for wheelchairs. Patrons can now purchase wheelchair seats for individual shows online with the promo code WHEELCHAIR. For more information, please contact the Box Office.). Click here for more thorough information.
