The Far Side of the Moon (review)

The Far Side Of The Moon. By Robert Lepage. Ex Machina and the Henson International Festival of Puppet Theater, The Public Theater, New York, New York. 9 September 2000.

Confronting a bombardment of images is inescapable in a city like New York: ads on the side of buses, poems and provocative ads inside subways, splashy billboards on buildings, postcard boxes in every restaurant, all of this on top of the stream of mediatized images that television culture provides. The contemporary production of images is so complex, technologically sophisticated, and prevalent that it seems everything is capable of representation, of being seen. Yet, Robert Lepage's latest production, The Far Side of the Moon, addresses the representation of what is unrepresentable and questions how what is seen may not be what it seems.

Far Side of the Moon, the recent piece written, directed, and performed by Lepage at the New [Begin Page 153] York Public Theater as part of the Henson Puppet Festival, exists on many levels of interpretation. Both haunting and humorous, the piece reads as a metaphor for the Soviet and American space race, a meditation on life and aging, and an inquiry into levels of life that are beyond the grasp of most people. This piece asks if what you see is actually what you get. On a purely narrative level, the story revolves around Philippe, a forty-two year old graduate student, and his younger brother André, a gay weatherman for the Weather Channel. Like the clouds of André's map, Philippe floats through unknown space trying to make sense of fleeting life, writing a dissertation on Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the theoretician who made it possible for a rocket to break through earth's gravity. André is more akin to the lines he draws to map the weather, concerned with social mores and being seen by the right crowd.

Most of Lepage's ideas are reinforced in the visual production elements. He has a knack for looking at objects anew depending upon their context, and he brilliantly weaves a commentary that things need not be what they appear. From sliding panels that act as walls, doors, or in one scene, an elevator, to a simple, circular glass door built into one of the walls that alternately becomes a washer/dryer, a fish bowl, or a space hatch, Lepage gives multiple meanings to ordinary objects. One of the more humorous set pieces, reminiscent of the drafting table used in La Géométrie des Miracles (Theatre Journal 51.3: 318-20) is an ironing board that when flipped becomes a gym workout room, from rowing machine to stationary bicycle depending on Lepage's seating position.

The overall mise en scène reminds me of a series of visual snapshots. Similar to other Lepage work, this piece has a horizontal movement pattern, with action moving back and forth across the stage in segmented room/areas in which a specific scene takes place. A floor to ceiling wall downstage of the sliding panels is the central moon metaphor, which rotates on its axis to reveal a huge mirror that reflects the audience on one side, a wall of blinding, bright neon lights on the other. Visually, Lepage demonstrates that meaning is created through context, that there exists a multiplicity in everything.

Stage left, a room appears and Philippe is on the phone trying to convince André to care for their deceased mother's goldfish as he clears her apartment. The dynamic of their relationship becomes clear when we next see Philippe in his apartment complete with the goldfish swimming about in a bowl. Like the fish, Philippe appears to be constantly searching, a perpetual student, in contrast to André's apparently forward-moving career. Philippe's "floating" is pointed out in one memorably poignant scene when, while conducting phone sales from home, he inadvertently gets an ex-girlfriend on the line, now a wealthy married woman with children. Their conversation spirals downward as their differences...