Festival ’90 : STAGE REVIEW : L.A. FESTIVAL : Epic Dramas of Chinese Life in Canada : Theater: In its six-hour version, the at-times engrossing ‘Dragon’s Trilogy’ feels like a marathon.

The title of “The Dragon’s Trilogy” may be slightly misleading. This trilingual presentation by Quebec City’s Theatre Repere is more like an epic three-part novel for the stage that takes place entirely in Canada.

We visit Quebec City (Part 1), Toronto (Part 2) and Vancouver (Part 3)--usually in the proximity of the Chinatown of each city. But only a few of the characters are Chinese. A couple are Japanese. Most speak French as well as English and Chinese. One is even Italian. But only late into the six-hour version of this trilogy are we offered an explanation:

“The dragon is the symbol of the part of yourself that you have to fight to arrive at something larger than yourself.” A bit Confucian, perhaps, but otherwise universal.

This joint presentation of the Mark Taper Forum, L.A. Festival and UCLA, seen over the weekend at UCLA’S MacGowan Hall, reveals to us another new company, the fertile mind of its director--Robert Lepage--and his fascination with form and simultaneity.

The story he delivers (written jointly by Lepage, Jean Casault and cast members Marie Brassard, Marie Gignac, Marie Michaud and Lorraine Cote) is that of best friends Jeanne (Michaud) and Francoise (a seductively gamin Gignac) who share a happy childhood on the outskirts of Quebec City’s Chinatown, but whose lives take drastically different turns.

Jeanne becomes pregnant out of wedlock and is rejected by her father (Richard Frechette), who gambles her away to a neighboring merchant, Mr. Wong (Yves-Erik Marier). Her life ends tragically after she is sent to Toronto’s Chinatown in a desultory marriage to Wong’s son Lee (Marier again).

Everything in Francoise’s life, on the other hand, soars. She marries happily and wealthily, has a delightful artist son (Robert Bellefeuille) who meets a fascinating young Japanese-American artist (Brassard), daughter of a Hiroshima victim, who works at the Vancouver airport gift shop.

A multiplicity of themes and characters weave in and out of a narrative that spans decades. It is not hard to follow despite the many languages spoken, but translation is occasionally clumsy and at least one character, Hong Kong-born William Crawford (Bellefeuille), sounds too French for an Englishman.

This fairly linear “Trilogy” is more remarkable for the stylized inventiveness and simplicity with which Lepage tells it rather than the story itself, which often digresses into entertaining but non-essential vignettes. It is enhanced by Robert Caux’s atmospheric musical score, a complex (though too consistently murky) lighting scheme by Lepage, Louis-Marie Lavoie and Lucie Bazzo--and Jean-Francois Couture’s and Gilles Dube’s setting of sand, props and a parking attendant’s hut that undergo artful transformations.

The whole is complemented by fine acting from Gignac, Brassard, Michaud, Normand Bissonnette and especially Cote as both Jeanne’s retarded daughter, Stella, and the well-meaning nun from the sanatorium who comes for her.

Still, at six hours it does feel like a marathon that could be more succinctly told with less time out for tangential prowess. We’ll get a chance to find out when the “Trilogy’s” three-hour version (which preceded and inspired the six-hour one) starts performances Sept. 26.

On the UCLA campus, 405 Hilgard Ave. in West L.A., six-hour version: Friday, 6 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m., $40 ($50 with dinner). Three-hour version, beginning Sept. 26: Wednesdays through Fridays,8 p.m., $25. Ends Oct. 14; (213) 972-7373.