The Anderson Project: Yves Jacques replaces Robert Lepage in the title and only role.

Yves Jacques in The  Anderson Project

The productions of writer, actor, and director Robert Lepage remain works-in-progress as they travel the world, often over a period of years. This is the case of his one-man show, Le Projet Andersen/The Andersen Project, first created in French in Québec City in 2005, and now playing in a largely English adaptation at ArtsEmerson’s Cutler Majestic Theatre. In many ways it is dissimilar from the French version I saw in Montreal in 2006.

Robert Lepage has been replaced by his alter ego, the bilingual Québécois actor Yves Jacques, and a layer of cultural significance lost in translation. In Lepage’s semi-autobiographical works, a Québécois leaves home and encounters the outside world.

The play’s four human characters are linked by sexuality and solitude, as well as plot. Frederic Lapointe, a Montreal pop music lyricist, is invited to Paris to write the libretto for an opera based on Hans Christian Andersen’s story, “The Dryad.” He accepts in part because he has broken up with his long-term girlfriend, but also because of the prestige of a Paris commission. His apartment, borrowed from a friend who has gone to Montréal for drug treatment, is located above a peep show. Its only employee is Rachid, a Moroccan who swabs out the booths between customers. Arnaud, the administrative director of Paris’s Opéra Garnier (and sometime patron of the peep show), ultimately rejects Lapointe’s libretto. Hans Christian Andersen drifts through the play in his top hat as a spirit of the past, fantasy, and frustration. Two of his stories are woven into the production.

Lapointe is now an English speaker from Montréal; Québec has been sanitized to Canada. To mark their cultural distinctions, Arnaud talks French (subtitled) except when he speaks English with Lapointe in a comically heavy French accent. In the French version, Lapointe’s Québécois accent labels him as an outsider, while Arnaud’s stereotypical behavior satirizes the sometimes condescending attitude of the French towards the Québécois. Lapointe’s discomfort in this world is the source of much of its humor, which is missing in the English adaptation I saw. Here he is differentiated as an albino. I wondered if the English translation shown in Canada handled the cultural issues otherwise.

Yves Jacques is skilled at creating the multiple and well-developed characters, who make a variety of physical and psychological demands on the actor. Character transitions are quickly and cleverly executed as, for example, when Jacques walks around a tree as Lapointe and reemerges as the Dryad. It is a good performance, but one I found lacking Lepage’s vulnerability and charisma.

Despite the changes, the production remains a multi-media tour de force whose stories are told as much through imagery as language. The set is both actual and virtual. The actual is horizontal and downstage, at various times porn booths, Metro cars, Paris parks, and a long conference table, which slide off the stage when not in use. The virtual utilizes projections – some moving, others still – on an enormous screen, bringing together the theatrical and the cinematic.

A voiceover, images, and puppetry recount the unhappy tale of the Dryad, a nymph living in a chestnut tree who longs to see the wonders of Paris. Her desire seems fulfilled when the tree is transported to the City of Light. Trapped in the tree, she wishes to become human and experience Paris, no matter the cost. Her wish granted, she goes to the grand Exposition on the Champ de Mars where she dies. The connection between the innocent Dryad and the naïve Lapointe is subtly made.

One of the most technically exciting moments is the train ride in which a drugged up Lapointe tears through the countryside, appearing to head toward the audience as we experience his high. Lights flash, colors change, wheels clack, music throbs as the train goes faster and faster, ending with Lapointe jumping off and bursting into a dance lit by strobes.

Not all effects rely on high tech, however. Andersen’s masochistic sexual fantasy of thwarted love is simply and beautifully enacted. As he dances with Jenny Lind, represented by a headless dressmaker’s dummy, he begins to strip the singer of her multitudinous garments, at first slowly with caresses, but finally roughly. When the naked “body” stands before him, he covers his eyes, impotent to proceed.

In another episode, Arnaud reads a bedtime story to his unseen beloved daughter by the light of a lamp. Although the reading is tender, the story, Andersen’s “The Shadow,” is cruel, an allegory of good and evil in which a moral man is destroyed by his greedy shadow, much like Arnaud.

The play contains many ideas and themes, but none more important than art. Each of the four characters relates to it in his own way. Andersen’s talent allowed him to turn the negative aspects of his life into art. Rachid spends his free time as a graffitist making political statements in the public arena. Arnaud, the Opéra Garnier’s artistic director, is anti-art, looking only for profit. And the protagonist Lapointe learns he has to be true to his art and himself.

In Montreal, at the play’s end, Lapointe exhorted the Québécois audience to rid themselves of a colonial mentality that led them to look to France for approval. This monologue is diluted in the English adaptation where, in a retort addressed to Arnaud, Lapointe speaks vaguely of Canadians needing the endorsement of European and U.S. cultural capitals. In Montreal, it was a significant speech; in Boston, it passed unnoticed. In the final image Lapointe’s face is projected onto the screen in a ring of fire. Is this the work of the drug dealers who threatened to burn down the apartment? Is it the unhappy ending of an Andersen-like fantasy? Or is it an image of the symbolic death of the Québécois artist who needed to realize himself in France?

In this fascinating, layered, and magical work multiple interpretations repeatedly offer themselves.

ArtsEmerson Presents

The Andersen Project

Written and directed by Robert Lepage

Performed by Yves Jacques

Sets, Jean Le Bourdais. Lights, Nicolas Marois. Costumes, Catherine Higgins. Sound, Jean-Sébastien Côté. Puppets, Jean-Nicolas Marquis. Images, Jacques Collin, Véronique Couturier, David Leclerc.

Production by Ex Machina/Robert Lepage

At: Cutler Majestic Theatre, Boston, MA