The Truth Fairy

Director Robert Lepage finds fact behind the fancy of Hans Christian Andersen.

by A.D. Amorosi

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Published: Jun 9, 2009

Em Vallette GREEN LIGHT SPECIAL: Canadian actor Yves Jacques stars in the one-man multimedia-heavy show The Andersen Project, which brings humanity to the transformative characters in Hans Christian Andersen's mixed-up world.

[ theater ]

Making dark dreamscapes real, murky nightmares focused and pothering commotions calm — at least long enough to see who stands within its shadows — is Robert Lepage's life work.

It's a twilight visual aesthetic — where epic, often chilling self-penned texts are told with deeply impassioned humanity — that's marked all the crafts of the Quebec-born playwright, actor, film and theater director. No wonder his one-man show The Andersen Project approaches the black-forest artistry of fairy-tale teller Hans Christian Andersen. This Canadian and that Dane are nearly one in the same.

"There's always been a theme in my life which has to do with being isolated, or the idea of solitude, which is probably why I ended up doing so many solo shows," says Lepage from an airport in Germany. "Andersen, too, was a solitary person."

Audiences never perceive the 19th-century writer that way, though, because his tales were lively and populated with a multitude of highly imaginary characters. But Andersen was an extremely lonely man, according to scholars like Lepage. "And he was obsessed with masturbation — not that people should think I'm obsessed with masturbation — but masturbation's a hyper-solitary sexual activity and reflects on the solitude which he lived in and tried to break out of by creating his imaginary world. So it is a touching, moving story, and I relate to that sense of isolation and solitude for personal reasons that I don't want to get into."

Lepage need not get into it. His work says it all.

With the most intimately detached elements of Robert Wilson, John Cheever and Laurie Anderson within the 51-year-old's mien, Lepage found the truth behind the fancy for The Dragons' Trilogy (1985); made iconic portraits of Shakespearean fare beyond the work of Peter Sellers with Macbeth, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream during the early '90s; and founded a multidisciplinary production company (Ex Machina) whose The Far Side of the Moon (2000) dreamily portrayed our space-race Cold War competition with Russia through the eyes of brothers — one gay, one straight — after their mother's death. That's how Lepage rolls.

This technical, spiritual, aesthetic through-line connecting everything Lepage's concocted is something he calls "geo-poetry": His A/V-heavy theatricals are about characters in need of travel to find themselves.

"There's nothing very original about that, but most of the characters in my plays are on a kind of initiation rite-of-passage voyage," says Lepage. "The El Dorado that they're looking for, or the answers to the questions that they're seeking, they find them within themselves."

His work is about those cultural clashes important to one's identity; there's a transformative misé-en-scene — not just through scrims, screens and multidimensional video play — where characters change and are re-contextualized.

"Usually whatever action or challenge the character is confronted with will eventually change him, so the whole thing's about transformation and translation," he says.

But it's not just translation from one language to another: Instead it's akin to what the Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream say to Bottom when he's transformed into an ass. "Bottom, you have been translated."

Call it a costume change, set change, character change or sex change — all changes within a Lepage play are more than what they appear to be.

Having stage-directed Peter Gabriel's Secret World Tour, the Met's Damnation of Faust and created KA for Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, it's no surprise how masterfully and subtly The Andersen Project's projections appear. The hyper-realist video backdrops are too perfect, an unexpected shock in near 3-D.

"Subject matters come with their period. In the case of Andersen, it's a lot of shadow-play," says Lepage. Andersen was obsessed with opera, puppetry, shadow-play and silhouette cuttings, and in his Project, starring French-Canadian actor Yves Jacques, it shows. Still, it's the humanity of his characters with weighty emotional backstories — the Canadian pop lyricist brought to Paris to write a libretto based on Andersen's The Dryad, the Machiavellian administrator of the Paris Opera, the maudlin father reading a sad bedtime story to a daughter he fears he's losing — where Lepage truly reigns.

He yields to Andersen's life — inner and outer — for the truth. "There're fairy tales we remember from Andersen because we heard them as kids or read them to our children, but the second part of his life was preoccupied with Freudian and darker themes," says Lepage. "Though he adhered to a fairy tale vocabulary, he was a mature thinker but has never been recognized as such. He struggled with that. That's the Andersen I wanted to show, by creating characters who identify with him."

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

The Andersen Project, Thu.-Sat., June 11-13, 8 p.m., $38-$48, Merriam Theater, 250 S. Broad St., 800-982-2787, kimmelcenter.org.

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