The Andersen Project, Merriam Theater, June 13

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The Andersen Project, Merriam Theater, June 13

POSTED: Wednesday, June 17, 2009, 6:11 PM

Filed Under: Arts Theater

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The Andersen Project, the flawlessly masterful latest work by the illustrious Quebecois theater-maker Robert Lepage, which received a three-show run at the Merriam this past weekend, is terrifically enjoyable and remarkable for many things: its proficient blending of energy, nuance, humor, pathos, high-culture erudition and pop accessibility; its ingenious and seamlessly incorporated multimedia stage design (which at times transports the production into a kind of hybrid live-action cinema), and, perhaps above all, the dazzling virtuosity of its sole onstage performer, the actor Yves Jacques. It's also notable for the way it manages to at once inhabit several familiar conventions of concept-driven contemporary performance and, through emphatic and almost old-fashioned mastery of the theatrical arts (not just technical but literary as well), reinvest those tropes with relevance and interest.

A piece that began as a commission from the Kingdom of Denmark to create a work inspired by Hans Christian Andersen, on the occasion of his bicentennial, Project's primary narrative follows a Canadian pop lyricist, Fr'd'ric Lapointe (whose albinism mirrors Lepage's alopecia), who has travelled from Montreal to Paris to work on the libretto for a new Andersen adaptation; an international collaboration under the auspices of the Paris Opera.' So it is, among other things, an artwork as meditation on the process of artistic creation, as well as a strongly semi-autobiographical piece, with no small amount of self-referentiality.

Andersen's presence makes it into something of a literary reference game, as well.' "The Dryad," a lesser-known Andersen story (evidently something an autobiographical allegory itself) which is chosen as the basis for Lapointe's libretto, and which is told interstitially throughout Lapage's piece, largely via puppets and projections, also concerns an outsider's complexly motivated journey to Paris.' Another immediately resonant Andersen story, the curious and rather macabre "The Shadow," becomes one of the piece's tour-de-force moments when the somewhat ruthless opera director (who's initially presented to us as a thickly accented caricature of brusque, businesslike efficiency), performs it in a simple but inventively staged shadow-play as a bedtime tale for his daughter, an especially poignant and humanizing scene in the context of his estranged and endangered marriage.

There are also some highly intriguing but fairly cursory investigations into the historical Andersen's life and times, including a brief appearance from the man himself ' a desperate, pantomimed pas de deux wherein he strips bare a mannequin representing his unrequited inamorata Jenny Lind ' which present him as a much more fascinating and conflicted figure than the children's fabulist most of us remember.' But on the whole Andersen functions as a vague symbolic reference point and an incidental narrative feature rather than the literal focus of the piece, although the connections between his emotional isolation, artistic aspirations, and tormented sexual preoccupations, and the proclivities and predicaments of the play's two primary characters (the lyricist and the opera director), are made amply evident.' (Not to mention the gestured-at parallels between literal and figurative forms of masturbation, which add another level of wry self-reference in the context of an autobiographical one-man-show.)'

Meanwhile, Rachid, a nearly anonymous graffiti artist of North African origin who works as an attendant at the porn shop above which Lapointe is staying (and which the opera director frequents), makes an underdeveloped fourth link in this chain of solitary strugglers.' He's barely a character sketch; with some more narrative attention and stage time he might have brought some interesting additional cultural and socio-political dimensions to The Andersen Project (although that may or may not have made it even farther removed from Andersen himself).' But as it is there's already so much there that it's nearly overwhelming.' A two-hour show presented without an intermission, shifting rapidly and fluidly from scene to scene (one of the more striking transformations progresses, without a break in the action, from a display of luggage at the Andersen museum in Copenhagen to a high-speed transcontinental train to a thumping, psychedelic Hamburg nightclub), it's a wild and unpredictable ride.' But above and beyond its magnificent production values and consistently thrilling spectacle, there's a heart to this piece resonating with a humanism which ' strangely enough, fairly distinct the play's treatment of its own central characters, and certainly unlike its romantically doomed vision of Andersen ' is sometimes grim but never hopeless.

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