Lepage’s ‘Needles and Opium’ a multisensory dreamscape

The heady rush of “Needles and Opium” enters the bloodstream at first through the eyes.

Robert Lepage’s 100minute theatrical adventure is as intoxicating and disorienting as a hallucination in its regional premiere at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. This is theater as a fugue state where your vision is dominated by a huge half cube whirling above the stage, lit by dreamy projections.

Then your ears are seduced by jazz reveries.

Words are largely unnecessary in this dreamscape of sensory overload. If the themes are sometimes as elusive as the narrative, there’s no one who deconstructs visual storytelling as astutely as Lepage, who has established himself as a stage wizard from opera to the circus.

His eclectic canon includes everything from the revelatory “Far Side of the Moon” and “The Andersen Project” to Cirque du Soleil hits “Ka” and “Totem.” This is a revival of a 1991 piece from his inventive Ex Machina company.

Swirling through the multimedia haze are the twin stories of American jazz legend Miles Davis (played by Wellesley Robertson III) wandering through Paris in 1949 while filmmaker Jean Cocteau (Olivier Normand) travels to New York. Davis falls for the élan of Paris, an artsy city where a black man is an equal, while Cocteau sneers at the shallowness of America, with its worship of productivity over pondering. Pivoting between dueling perspectives, the staging is at once magical and confounding with actors crawling the walls like flies and furniture popping in and out of the frame.

If you’re a word junkie, it’s easy to get frustrated by the lack of text here. However if you simply let the dizzying tumult of music and tableaux wash over you, the sheer vertigo “Needles” induces can be highly stimulating, if not addictive. The noirish use of sound and shadow also elevates the acrobatics of the staging, which is sublime.

The greatest fault of the eye-popping staging, with its surreal film protections bouncing off the spinning cube, is that it upstages the acting to the point where the performances can disappear into the background.

Normand, who plays Cocteau as well as Robert, a Canadian actor cut from the Lepage mold, vainly tries to flesh out the inner life of the famous director. But Cocteau’s insights into the American ethos, from its lack of depth to his predictions of the rise of a police state, never seem tethered to core of the story.

The actor is far more memorable as the unknown actor struggling to slog through the grief of a messy breakup. He’s desperate to find a way out of the pain but there is no way out, except trudging slowly ahead. The gymnastic Robertson III lets his character’s trumpet do the communicating for him which is quite effective, if a little imbalanced.

Alas, the meditation on heartbreak at the core of the narrative peters out, instead of actually ending. But perhaps embracing enigma is part of the point here.