The Seven Streams of the River Ota
The theater must be larger than you are. –Robert Lepage
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Lepage is out to tell seven delicate little stories that fold in and around one another throughout the evening. The piece begins in Hiroshima during the American occupation, as a GI tours the city taking official photographs of the physical destruction wrought by the Bomb. He meets Nozomi, a young Japanese woman whose face has been disfigured by radiation. He wants to take a picture of her house; she wants him to take a picture of her face, as a counterweight to her largely overlooked existence.
Lepage’s stories have the ring of fairy tales: elemental, emblematic, and full of coincidence. We know little about the characters except the predicaments they find themselves in. So when the American Jeffrey ends up dying of AIDS two decades later in the evening’s fourth story, he’s more icon than person, meant to symbolize the burgeoning epidemic rather than draw the audience deeper into one individual’s psychology. His suicide is staged in a shoebox set, his friends and family lined up like figures in a religious frieze.
Despite all the press hoopla over Lepage’s high-tech stage magic, something he does well, Seven Streams is made up almost entirely of conventional realistic scenes, something he does poorly. When directing his actors he can’t seem to build tension or vary tempo, except in a scene’s final moments, when a big emotional payoff suddenly erupts. Where that other seven-and-a-half-hour play Angels in America tore through contemporary urban life with breathtaking speed, Seven Streams strolls casually across the years, rarely getting too worked up about anything–a curious strategy when around every corner lurks the Hiroshima atomic blast, the Nazi Holocaust, and AIDS. Seven Streams is a model of theatrical inefficiency, and its two hours’ worth of thought-provoking material slips away like a pound of sugar dumped in the ocean.
