Theater sans Frontières: Essays on the Dramatic Universe of Robert Lepage ed. by Joseph I. Donohoe, Jr, Jane M. Koustas (review)

378 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 emulating >the worst aspects of straight culture B sanctimonious monogamy and Christianity, for example.= He complains that >the queers in the community weren=t coming to Buddies the way they were supposed to B they were still going to opera and baseball games instead.= Nothing prohibits baseball-loving gay men from also attending avant-garde theatre. They are not mutually exclusive forms of entertainment. Moreover, queers are not >supposed to= go see theatre as if it were some inalienable homosexual obligation. Treating queerness as a sexual category, Gilbert cannot grasp that gay men have other ways of deeming themselves homosexual: as Christians, as opera-lovers, as baseball-spectators, as monogamous couples. Decrying commercial theatre as a >charm factory,= Gilbert never overcomes the ideological contradictions of wanting to promote innovative representations of homosexuality and to appeal to an audience sophisticated enough to care about those innovations. >The theatre was me,= he writes about Buddies in Bad Times as he prepares to leave it. That may be true. But that doesn=t mean audiences want to take another trip inside his larger-than-life ego or to witness another of his >radical, outrageous ejaculations.= Self-importance blinds him to the subtleties and contradictions that animate gay culture. (ALLAN HEPBURN) Joseph I. Donohoe, Jr, and Jane M. Koustas, editors. Theater sans Frontières: Essays on the Dramatic Universe of Robert Lepage Michigan State University Press. x, 270. US $29.95 Theater sans Frontières: Essays on the Dramatic Universe of Robert Lepage is a welcome and long overdue compilation of critical essays in English on the theatrical world of the Quebec actor, director, playwright, and filmmaker. This selection of essays does not attempt to tie the pieces together or align the work in support of one singular thesis; rather it presents different viewpoints on his productions and analyses the same shows from variant angles in articles written by scholars from Europe and North America. The book covers Lepage=s wide-ranging creative output and takes a closer look at his theatre, film, and musical productions, as well as touching on the critical reception of his work. The most frequently analysed productions are The Dragons= Trilogy and The Seven Streams of the River Ota. Jeanne Bovet examines multilingualism in The Trilogy and Vinci, using as the theoretical framework for her analysis the parameters >identity and communication= as outlined by the sociolinguist Jean A. Laponce. She argues persuasively that once the protagonists of these two plays have found their identities through their >identity-tongue= they access universality. None of the authors mention Brecht in their essays, even though Lepage borrows many devices from him. Brecht, for instance, states that only the depiction of a specific individual situation can lead to HUMANITIES 379 universality. Bovet also touches on a point made by various scholars B the association of Lepage=s work with the political and social situation of Quebec. Both arguments, exploration of identity and universality and the québécois point of view, are also discussed by James Bunzli, demonstrating how the interaction of many languages (verbal, visual, narrative theatrical, technical, musical, and iconic) coexist and provide Lepage with means to deconstruct identity by fragmentation and at the same time reconstruct and universalize it. The Trilogy, Ota, and Tectonic Plates are used by Christie Carson as examples to show Lepage=s creative process. She parallels his quest to capture the essence of culture and his modes of communicating this to the audience first to her personal response to different versions of these productions then to the reaction of the international press. Jennifer Harvie is as critical as Carson in her analysis of The Trilogy and Ota, accusing Lepage of handling other cultures in a >relentlessly clichéd= way. Sherry Simon examines the >interplays between the local, the national, and the transnational= in relation to Lepage=s use of language in The Trilogy and Ota. According to her argument, both productions >challenge the idea of translation as transmission, to replace it with a concept of Atranslational culture.@= Shawn Huffman uses Greimassian semiotics to analyse the various drifts in Tectonic Plates. It is a very theoretical but convincing article showing that art...