New take on a play born of heartbreak
Nursing a broken heart and seeking oblivion in Paris, Robert Lepage checked into Room 9 at the Hotel La Louisiane. The better days of the modest bohemian redoubt in St.-Germaindes-Prés were long behind it in 1989, but the French Canadian playwright and director knew that Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir stayed there during the Nazi occupation (in separate rooms), which added a romantic cast to his despair. In one of those coincidences that so often lead Lepagian protagonists to glimmers of self-discovery, a front desk clerk happened to mention that singer Juliette Gréco and Miles Davis conducted their brief but intense 1949 love affair in the same room.
That titillating kernel sparked Lepage’s breakthrough play “Needles and Opium,” which premiered in 1991 as a one-man production exploring the nearly concurrent transAtlantic journeys of Davis and writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, who were connected through Gréco.
While La Louisiane reinvented itself in the 21st century as an incubator for French tech startups, at the time it was “a very simple humble little hotel, and I was in this circular room that Sartre and Beauvoir gave to Juliette Gréco, who had a twoweek affair with Miles,” said Lepage, 59, speaking from the Quebec City office of his production company Ex Machina. “She was set to make her film debut in Jean Cocteau’s ‘Orpheus.’ No one had connected these dots before. The room was sweating with ghosts, and I spent so much time there crying my eyes out.”
Lepage brings a new, technologically enhanced production of “Needles and Opium” to ACT’s Geary Theater starting Thursday, March 30, featuring Olivier Normand playing Cocteau and a lovelorn man named Robert. The acrobat/actor Wellesley Robertson III portrays the famously taciturn trumpeter as a wordless wraith walking up walls with horn in hand.
Lepage introduced the reimagined production in 2013, a rare move by a ceaselessly creative figure whose multidisciplinary Ex Machina team creates new works for film, theater, dance, video and opera (like San Francisco Opera’s 2007 production of “The Rake’s Progress”).
“I don’t usually revisit old work,” he said. “I’m more focused on trying to explore new ground. But I saw this show, and there are all these great ideas. We’re in a different world 27 years later, a world created by 9/11, and a lot of what Jean Cocteau says in his letter brings on a new meaning.”
Lepage threads text from Cocteau’s “A Letter to Americans” throughout “Needles and Opium,” which is more a series of impressions and striking emotional and intellectual tableaux than a plot-driven narrative. A central figure in Western Europe’s avant-garde as a poet, essayist, filmmaker and thinker, Cocteau made his
first trip to the U.S. in 1949, an exhilarating and disorienting experience that he tried to distill in a brief book he wrote on the plane ride back to Paris. Dismayed by New York City’s grid of streets and the stultifying order he saw in American life, he felt that the United States’ embrace of technology came at a steep cost.
“I have seen you, Americans, letting your masks fall and mechanically re-securing them, the way records fall into place in your bars,” Cocteau wrote, referring to the prevalence of jukeboxes. “One day, if you embrace such mechanical behavior, you will order your dinner in one of these bars, you’ll pay for it, someone else will eat it for you; and you will be nourished, without having chewed the meat.”
Around the same time, Miles Davis left New York City on his first trip to Europe. He was recording his epochal, ninepiece “Birth of the Cool” sessions when a taste of life outside of America’s racial caste system and his first emotionally charged love affair gave him a glimpse at a new world of possibilities. Decades later, in his autobiography with Quincy Troupe, he marveled, “I had never felt that way in my life. It was the freedom of being in France and being treated like a human being. … Music had been my total life until I met Juliette Gréco and she taught me what it was to love someone other than music.”
As the play’s title suggests, Lepage zeroes in on the artists’ mutual drug dependence. Davis was nursing a growing heroin habit, and Cocteau was chasing the dragon. Robert, the playwright’s barely veiled alter ego, is wrestling with an addiction to love. Davis was a towering intellectual figure by any measure; and one needn’t embrace Lepage’s (and Cocteau’s) reductive, romanticized and very French view of African American culture to recognize the way these twinned journeys capture something about the conflicts and contradictions of the mid-20th century (and perhaps today).
“One character was much more from the guts, black blues and jazz, very visceral and sensuous,” he said. “You oppose that to the intellect of this very aristocratic, surreal poet. They’re taking similar drugs that one smokes and the other injects. They represent the yin and yang of how the world was redefining itself.”
Lepage played the role of Cocteau/Robert for the first three years of the original oneman production. It was a lowtech affair, using overhead projections and a harness so the actor could hang above the stage. As you might expect from Lepage, whose groundbreaking multimedia productions include Cirque du Soleil’s “Ka” and numerous works presented by Cal Performances (“La Casa Azul,” “The Busker’s Opera” and “The Andersen Project”), he took the opportunity to work his technological magic on “Needles and Opium,” evoking an opioid dreamscape.
“The ground is never stable,” he said. “Things float and you have to renegotiate every body movement. It was an opportunity to push that experience further. Whatever project we develop, there’s always a moment where technology catches up with the idea.”
If Lepage’s work focused primarily on exploring new technological toys, it wouldn’t have such enduring emotional resonance. Running in countercurrent to his abiding curiosity about the world is his penchant for soul-searching. Lepage is famous for weaving autobiographical details into his work, providing wrenching or wry meta commentary on the plight of the displaced artist contending with the creative process in a strange land, much like Cocteau and Davis.
“We’re always telling the same story over and over. Ulysses goes out looking for himself. He needs to leave to know who he is. In any great story, the hero has to feel as a stranger somewhere, has to compare his values confronted by other values,” Lepage said before taking a decidedly Cocteauesque turn. “That’s changed a bit. People have the illusion they’re traveling now. We talk with people on the other side of the world on Skype, and live in a CNN world. It’s important to show stories of people who get lost and disoriented, who actually physically put themselves through the mill.”