Poignant memories of life
Making meaning out of our everyday experiences
Quebec’s Robert Lepage may be the world’s most famous living theatre artist. A play like The Far Side Of The Moon helps you understand why.
The man is a wizard. As writer, director, designer and actor, he makes the stage a magical place where astonishing transformations occur before your eyes. Sometimes these special effects seem to exist for their own showy sake. But at his best, Lepage uses those moments to tell a compelling story.
The Far Side Of The Moon deals with two Quebec City brothers, sad-sack intellectual Philippe and cocky André, a TV weatherman. Philippe is having trouble dealing with the recent death of their mother and his own lonely life. He’s obsessed with the history of space exploration. The play explicitly uses the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States, beginning with Russia’s launch of the first Sputnik in 1957, as a metaphor for the brothers’ relationship.
Lepage chooses to tell the story using only a single actor (Lepage himself will play the role Nov. 6-10) and some remarkable theatrical technology, most of it pretty low-tech.
He’s not trying to save money. He and his producing company, Ex Machina, are very well funded.
His recent productions of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at New York’s Metropolitan Opera cost something like $45 million.
What he’s showing us here is the power of the human imagination to make meaning, and poetry, from the stuff of everyday experience.
Some of the images are absolutely stunning. Philippe leans into a washing machine to retrieve his clothes and suddenly emerges from a space capsule. That effect is achieved relatively simply via video camera. Later, even more simply, only a mirror will be used to create an extraordinary ballet of weightlessness: We see the actor lying on the stage and simultaneously see him floating in space.
In another powerful sequence Philippe goes into his mother’s closet and recalls how proud she was of her elegant dresses and shoes. Suddenly he’s dressed as her, poignantly removing little boys’ clothes from the wash.
Philippe’s ironing board becomes a gym bench, a stationary bike, a motorcycle, even another character. Andre, stuck in an elevator with the old bookcase that used to divide his room from Philippe’s, is transported back to childhood with the help of a Led Zeppelin song, a break from Laurie Anderson’s haunting score that runs through most of the show.
Newsreels, other video projections and dramatic lighting effects help mark transitions and tell the story. There’s also a little cosmonaut puppet that appears from time to time, one of the only devices that struck me as cutesy and redundant. I much prefer watching the actor create an elevator simply by writing with chalk on a wall.
The show runs for more than two hours without intermission. As compelling as Lepage’s stage magic may be, it could still use an edit, especially the one-way conversations and lengthy phone calls. One priceless monologue, though, is central to the story. Philippe explains to a bartender his understanding of the difference between the Soviet term cosmonaut and the American astronaut. One he defines as an artist, the other as “very well funded.”
Philippe himself inadvertently becomes an artist of the cosmos, creating a video explaining life on earth to an audience of imagined space aliens. For Lepage this is both a joke and not a joke. (Guess who we are in this scenario.) Philippe is a portrait of the artist as both hopeless loser and intrepid explorer. He can’t keep a goldfish alive but he embodies the human impulse to discover what lies on the far side of the moon.
Lepage will perform the Nov. 6 show in French. Don’t miss it in either official language.