Robert Lapage's The Blue Dragon in Berkeley

Wow! I just saw the future of theater. I had no idea what I was going to see. I went into Oakland today to see friends I've known forever. They were going to a play tonight and asked if I wanted to come along. I said sure.

Then we picked up my ticket at will call after dinner and walked around campus till it began.

No pictures during the show, but I took this before and it will help a little to understand why this was so incredible. If you look at the stage, you can see the three vertical lines that divide the stage into four units. Think of the stage more as a computer window that can be divided into eight frames. Four on top and four below. The stage was alternatively one large frame, one half screen frame, or one small frame; two frames (top and bottom, two small frames, though I can't remember how often or how configured, I remember one small one on top and another below over to the side open together.)

But there was also a "curtain" that was the canvas for computer graphics, which again could be part of the whole or the whole itself. This is like describing someone tying his shoe. It may get you the info, but the reader still can't tie the shoelace, or, in this case, imagine the stage.. It rained and it snowed, for example, it was an airport with perfect arrival and departure signs.

The play opened - I'm not even sure which of the following was first, but I think I have it right - with a man standing on the lower half of the screen/stage, at a small table about to do calligraphy. As he uses the brush to make his strokes, a single solid horizontal stroke appears above him in the upper left frame. And he talks about the Chinese character for the number one. Then he makes a tree and then a forest. Then he does child and it appears in the next screen. Immediately I knew this was going to be my kind of experience.

I think this was followed by the Chinese dancer in white came out. (Though she might have been first.)

She danced with her scarf flowing. Then suddenly puffs of white exploded out of the end of the scarf as the computer extended her dance magically. And as this was happening on the lower half, the black screen also became a movie screen with the credits. (Don't bet on the sequences exactly, I'm trying to pull this out of memory totally.)

This all could have been a big gimmick, but it wasn't. Robert Lapage managed to use a much greater variety of tools to help him create his stage and it almost all fit absolutely perfectly. The actors at times blended in with computer graphics.

The almost two hour play just flew by. In part, I think because the scenes changed more like television than a play. We didn't have the stage simply go black and wait as actors moved furniture for the next scene. Instead the scenes evaporated and appeared through the graphics. The stage was a perfect passenger section of a jet, it was a commuter train, a regular train, a boat. It was the Canadian ex pat's two story loft apartment, an art gallery, a bar.

What I've always liked about movies is that when done well, they could tell the story in visual - color, light and dark, etc. - and audio and tell the story with more than words. They went beyond theater because you could have the real world as your stage. Lepage has used the computer to make this possible on stage too.

Now, since I've spent all this time on the stagecraft, you might be wondering about the play. Surely it was upstaged by all the glitz. Perhaps in the same way that seeing one's first movie would cause you to talk about the technology more than the story. Well, it wasn't glitz. All the techie stuff was exactly right for the story. It wasn't gratuitous. I've seen computer generated backdrops, and lighting, and the incredible dancing of Bridgman and Packer who danced on stage with live video of themselves dancing. In their performance at times you couldn't tell, even though we were very close, which was the live dancer and which the video.

Lepage has taken all the experimentation and applied it to his story of the French-Canadian artist expat in Shanghai whose old friend visits him on her way to adopting a baby in China. The story of their two compromised careers, of the need for babies, of love, of disappointment, all of this was told almost movie like, but with live actors on stage before a live audience. Three very real actors and lots of brilliant stagecraft.

I was totally dazzled.

(There were two scenes that I might have cut. At least I didn't feel they were integrated into the whole as seemlessly as everything else. The Chinese KFC ad near the beginning generated laughs, but wasn't connected to anything else in the play. My friends suggested it helped show the contrast between the old and new China, but to me it seemed an intrusion. I also didn't quite understand the scene with the iconic Chinese revolutionary dancer. The CCTV (Chinese Central Television) going-off-the-air broadcast worked better because it emphasized the closing of a night and it ended in static which transferred onto the stage.

I'm still stoked and absolutely delighted G and H pulled me into this. Great night. Anyone in the Berkeley area who wants to see a great production has a few more days left. (Comparing the box office dates to the post card dates, I'm guessing they added a couple of performances.)

Here's a more professional review from the Bay Area Arts and Entertainment Blog.