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The Gazette
Five curtain calls. A fitting choice for the FTA's opener.
Artists may be the shock troops of gentrification, but it takes the genius of Robert Lepage to lure Montreal’s entire corps of first-night glitterati to a dust-filled industrial site in neo-trendy Pointe St.Charles.
You couldn’t move without bumping into a director, elbowing a playwright or stomping on a vedette as the Festival de ThŽätre des AmŽriques launched its 10th edition with an epic performance of Lepage’s La Trilogie des dragons at Usine d’Alstom on Thursday night.
As advertised, the refurbished trilogy is a magnificent feat of Lepage’s hallucinatory stage magic.
The premiere show earned the cheers that shook the old railcar repair hangar with five curtain calls, Lepage joining the cast of eight for the final two rounds of wall-rippling applause.
Unveiled at the 1987 FTA, the trilogy has since traveled the world, establishing Lepage as an international theatre superstar. The Dragons’ triumphant return was a fitting choice for the opener, a reminder of the great success achieved in the past 15 years by the biennial fest and its favorite son.
Half a dozen writers, including Marie Brassard and Marie Michaud, share the writing credits with the director, but La Trilogie is unmistakably Lepage’s work, an excavation of his Quebec City roots so profound, it reaches all the way to China.
A sprawling tale of three generations plucked from Canada’s multicultural mosaic, La Trilogie requires tons of crunchy Zen-garden gravel, six hours, and four languages - French, English, Chinese and Japanese - to tell.
With three intermissions, including a 45-minute pitstop before the 80-minute Dragon blanc finale, La Trilogie takes a full act to set its own sweet pace for a performance that is always compelling in its relentless push toward transcendence, achieved in the serenity of a tai chi dance and in the chaos at the outbreak of war; to name just to scenes.
A deep sense of perfection runs through it. The acting is faultless, no single motion wasted, no voices raised without good reason. Thanks to Lepage’s prodigiously inventive stagecraft, visual excitement is always the main presence on stage. The effects are low-tech and more powerful for it, bringing a warm touch of theatrical imagination to the post-industrial wasteland of the grimy Usine d’Alstom.
Lepage packs the stage with so many new conceptual thrills, only a conservative churl could notice that even his best work lacks the sturdy dramatic sinews and the emotional brimstone that distinguishes theatre’s greatest hits. Seen another way, Lepage’s collective “work in progress,” like this newly refined La Trilogie, could be his way of moving away from the tyrannies imposed by traditional notions of “text”.
