Into the Mouth of the Dragon : Theatre Repere’s multilingual ‘Dragons’ Trilogy’ is a poetic look at the collision of French and English cultures

“The Dragons’ Trilogy” suddenly became topical this year. Writer-director Robert Lepage and the Quebec City troupe Theatre Repere created the sprawling, epic play five years ago--long before the current wave of tension between French- and English-speaking people that has shaken Canada’s political landscape.

That often uneasy relationship is at the heart of “The Dragons’ Trilogy.” It starts off in Quebec City’s Chinatown during the Depression, but the complex, experimental work isn’t really about the setting. Chinatown is where the English and French meet, and its image is the catalyst for a poetic look at the collision of French and English cultures, complete with a guided tour of 20th-Century Canada, with pit-stops in 1930s Quebec, World War II Toronto, and present-day Vancouver. Multilingual pieces are Theatre Repere’s trademark, and there is English, French and Chinese dialogue in the production.

The linguistic melting pot is certainly a factor in the play’s phenomenal success. The show’s 200th performance will take place during its monthlong run at UCLA’s Freud Amphitheater starting Friday as part of the Los Angeles Festival. The play has packed houses in Quebec City, Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, London, Paris, Barcelona, and Adelaide, Australia. Repere has been touring the show on and off for the past five years, and they’ve amassed an impressive stack of rave reviews from newspapers around the world, including the Times of London, which called “The Dragons’ Trilogy” “a masterpiece.”

It’s an extraordinary track record for a challenging, loosely structured play created by a small, avant-garde theater company from Quebec City. It’s been popular since Day One. But it only became controversial this year, due to the renewed political feuding in Canada in the aftermath of the failure of the Meech Lake Accord last June. (The deal was to bring Quebec back into the Canadian constitutional family, but it fell apart just before the self-imposed June 23 deadline.)

Robert Lepage is the director of “The Dragons’ Trilogy,” one of the authors of the collective creation and the main man behind Theatre Repere. The 32-year-old Quebec City native is considered the boy wonder of Quebec theater. He is a prolific writer, director, and actor (he plays Pontius Pilate in the movie “Jesus of Montreal”), and he’s had major success with Repere and on his own.

Lepage was dismayed when “The Dragons’ Trilogy” became a victim of anti-French bigotry in Western Canada this summer. During its run in Winnipeg, Manitoba, there were threats of a boycott, audience members walked out on the play and shouted insults during the performances. All because the play is partly in French. The version in L.A. will be approximately two-thirds English, one-third French.

“We’ve been a victim of this misunderstanding,” said Lepage, in a recent interview. “I have the same opinion as a lot of people in Quebec. I’m very shocked by English Canada’s reaction to Quebec, by the manifestation of hatred. Of course, it fuels the separatist in me. But I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding on both sides in the post-Meech period. We have to be careful.”

Lepage’s willingness to fault both camps in the debate doesn’t sit well with the more doctrinaire nationalists back home in Quebec. Lepage and Theatre Repere have taken criticism from the beginning for their willingness to incorporate English into their work. Their more international perspective was a break with traditional Quebec theater, and it led to criticism that the company was watering down Quebec culture to succeed outside the province.

There will be more ammunition for the critics this fall, as Repere gears up for a serious assault on the English-speaking theater world. After the L.A. premiere of “The Dragons’ Trilogy,” the troupe heads to Glasgow for a Scottish co-production of “Tectonic Plates”--the group’s latest major piece--and then the new work goes to London’s National Theatre in December. In October, another set of actors from the company will present the American debut of the murder-mystery “Polygraphe” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival.

Lepage believes they have made in-roads into the international scene without compromising their roots.

“I think I am a nationalist,” says Lepage. “But the nationalists think I’m fishy because I don’t express my nationalism in an obvious way. ‘The Dragons’ Trilogy’ is about the Canadian mosaic, but it’s French-Canadian impressions. It’s a very Quebec show. I think it is one of the most nationalist pieces ever written in Quebec theater.

“It clearly shows a very distinct society. It’s very nationalist even if I’m very interested in English Canada. Maybe that’s because I’m sure of my identity.

“People were shocked because there was so much English in it. We answered that, of course, Quebec is a French province, but it is surrounded by English, and we use English a lot. We cannot pretend that we don’t hear English on the street.”

“The Dragons’ Trilogy” grapples with this cultural baggage using Repere’s unique visual, stream-of-consciousness style. The central image is a parking lot where Quebec City’s Chinatown once stood. Lepage has the uncanny ability of transforming ordinary objects into extraordinary images. The parking lot, the attendant’s booth, a huge pile of sand and an array of props manage to stand in for a large slice of 20th-Century life in Canada. The parking lot cabin becomes a doctor’s office, a Chinese laundry, a stairway and an airport gift shop. Shoeboxes become stores in Chinatown.

“Most of our work is visually explicit,” says Lepage. “We use lots of body language. When we perform partly in French, people know the key words. People discover they know much more French than they think they know. Suddenly Americans understand French. The audience loves to feel intelligent. The idea of using that much French when we go to the U.S. is an interesting limitation. It’s like traveling for the audience, and people love to travel.”

The central characters in “The Dragons’ Trilogy” are two French-Canadian girls, Jeanne and Francoise, and it charts their lives from the 1930s to the present. For actress Marie Gignac--who portrays Francoise, and has been with the show since its debut in Quebec City in 1985--the play’s appeal is easily explained.

“The show is simple to understand, but you go real deep into your emotions when you watch the show,” says Gignac. “It’s about love, tenderness, death, and tolerance between people from different ethnic groups.”

The original version of the play was three hours, but there is now an expanded six-hour version too. Both versions will be performed in Los Angeles. Lepage and his cast prefer the longer one, and, surprisingly, they insist the audience likes the epic format as well.

“For six hours, people just sit here and they have the impression that they’re part of a community,” says Lepage. “Today, artists are into communication, not communion. ‘Trilogy’ has this sense of communion. It’s a moving show. Nowadays, when people are moved by a movie or a TV program, there’s always something fishy about it. Usually, you’re trying to sell something. But there’s no commercial trend attached to ‘Trilogy.’ There’s a sense of ritual and community that you don’t get at other events. It’s a simple story, but it touches you in places that you’re not used to being touched. People like to be told stories that way.”

“The Dragons’ Trilogy” was the first show to put Theatre Repere on the map internationally. The group was founded in Quebec City in 1980, and Lepage joined two years later. He stepped down as artistic director last January to accept the prestigious post as artistic director of the French theater section at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, but he continues to work closely with Repere.

Lepage’s invents all his Repere plays collectively with the actors, using improvisation and other experimental methods.

“For Lepage, the text is a point of departure,” says Richard Frenchette, one of the actors in “The Dragons’s Trilogy.”

“He’s a sculptor working in the theater. Robert has a great ability to rediscover the meaning of objects and the meaning of language. He uses language like a theatrical object. He uses French, English, Italian, or Chinese like a chair.”

Lepage calls it “theater of exploration,” and he feels it packs such an emotional punch because it deals in impressions not intellectual analysis.

“We never start with an idea,” says Lepage. “We always start with a resource, and that changes the whole process. If you start with an intellectual idea, you’ll get into a lot of discussion. but we never do that. We start with a resource, which is something you can only have impressions about. Like a deck of cards or a parking lot. People give their impressions, and, suddenly, you see there’s a line. Something comes out. The basic resource or metaphor for ‘The Dragons’ Trilogy’ was the parking lot and seeing all these footprints. You can imagine streets in Chinatown and, if you dig deep enough, you can imagine people being buried there.”