STAGE REVIEW : Shorter Version of ‘Dragons’ Has Problem: It’s Too Long

First we had the six-hour version, now we have the three-hour one. Verdict: We saw this one through the right end of the telescope the first time.

To explain: The artists of Quebec City’s Theatre Repere have maintained that they did not shrink their six-hour “The Dragons’ Trilogy” to three, but rather that, fascinated as they became by the unfilled spaces of their original three-hour text, they expanded it to six.

At six hours, this trilogy of three Canadian Chinatowns, playing on the stage of the Ralph Freud Playhouse at UCLA, felt a little protracted. Imagine one’s surprise then at discovering that the three-hour version feels even more so.

A contradiction? Seemingly, but easily explained when you remember that the three-hour version came first. What we get is not a compression of six hours into three, but simply fewer of the quasi-same scenes found in the longer version and less continuity. The effect is negative on content, which now appears as thin as gruel, and on tempo--grindingly slow.

This story of two childhood friends, Jeanne (Marie Michaud) and Francoise (Marie Gignac), who grow up to have extremely different lives is not only harder to follow, but it also lacks some of the more striking characters, such as Marie Full-of-Grace, the colorful sister of charity created by actress Loraine Cote.

A particularly talented performer, Cote plays only Jeanne’s brain-damaged daughter Stella now, depriving us of her chameleon transformations in the longer version, wherein she slipped uncannily from playing the ward to playing the keeper and back again.

Important details are simply not there. We never hear about Jeanne’s sterile marriage to Lee Wong (Gaston Hubert); we don’t suffer the complicated anguish of their conflict over whether to commit Stella to a sanatorium, and we are not told or shown Jeanne’s death as a suicide. We also skip right over Francoise’s happy marriage and see her only in possession of a strapping son (Robert Bellefeuille). That dubious final and chatty act in Vancouver here feels seriously disconnected.

The absences are not only informational. Some of the “Trilogy’s” more arresting scenes come only in the six-hour version and most of director Robert Lepage’s best ideas as well. Compounding the damage, the bilingual actors speak too much French much too softly to each other too much of the time about far too little. Straining to hear what they have to say for three hours, let alone understand, constitute major frustrations.

In fact, the so-called “short” version of “The Dragons’ Trilogy” is 3 1/2 hours long with its two intermissions and feels longer than its six-hour counterpart. All the symbolism and imagination in the world don’t overcome a fairly empty center masked by indulgent obfuscation, because “The Mahabharata” this isn’t.

An idea for the future might be to rework it the other way: Shelve this three-hour version as a first draft and focus on compressing the best of the six-hour one into a tighter and more urgent piece.