“A shabby apartment building becomes a cabinet of wonders in Ex Machina’s glittering ‘887’…The show’s beginning is seductive, brazen…The play has its excessively tangential moments and some indulgent ones, too…Its best moments share a childlike simplicity…There are many technological marvels but they’re humanely scaled and rarely deployed for their own sake. Raw emotional force builds from the accretion of slight moments of remembrance and discovery.”
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“In the heart-stoppingly gorgeous ‘887,’ the auteur is deft and perfect again, meshing reminiscence and images together with a watchmaker's care…The gentle memory show combusts into a political cri de coeur. Details from earlier in the play explode like timed charges…You leave, at least partially knowing how he felt. A day later, I can still feel the show smoldering its way through my synapses—searing its way into being unforgettable.”
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“An intensely personal revisiting of his childhood in Quebec...If '887’ is essentially the story of a memory exercise, it is all the more authentic as the presentation of life as it is lived, without much time to connect the dots. What makes the show memorable is its artistry. ‘887’ is theater on a grand scale...It is storytelling as great performance, with Lepage moving seamlessly through childhood and adulthood...Proof again of Lepage’s unparalleled powers of observation and creative genius."
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"There’s a theme bubbling beneath the surface about class and opportunity, and the suggestion that the great movements of history were determined by injustice and inequality. Lepage continues to develop his work beyond opening night and he may yet find more mileage in the story of his grandmother, whose memory loss chimes with the themes of '887' but doesn’t fully connect. That, though, is a minor niggle in a work that delights, mesmerizes and provokes."
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"'887' glides smoothly through time and place, artfully constructing a cloud of associations as it goes...Lepage never ties everything together, preferring that cloud to anything more concrete...Even if you don't come away with fresh understanding of history and memory, it's a beguiling show, full of ultra-pleasing theatricality...Only afterwards do you realise how little it leaves behind, as ephemeral as a memory. But then, maybe, that's the point."
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"How to remember? He tries an ancient method – the memory palace: think of a place you know well, assign to areas within it those things you want to recall. This subtly develops into an exploration of what makes a life worthwhile, a society worth living in...Lepage dazzlingly creates shifting perspectives to conjure his unique private-public memoryscape...This unostentatious, meticulously crafted two-hour performance is touching, intimate, powerful."
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"Robert Lepage’s extraordinary solo play '887' prompts such tantalizing, ultimately unanswerable questions. Autobiographically rooted, it peers into Lepage’s past. It explores what it means to be Québécois. It ponders the significance of theatre. It blends digital technology with children’s toys with some very funny lines. And all the while, '887' is as welcoming and resonant as Lepage’s voice itself."
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"Memory is not a smooth silk but a loose and lumpy fabric of threads drawn from the past. And this show does not keep a smooth or logical order; rather it is composed of small moments from childhood — precise, poignant, surreal — cut with the collective memory of a people trying to define itself...'887' is rich, baggy and overlong...This one, full of strange and fascinating insights, is a bit like listening to someone describe their dream. You feel it would benefit from an outside editor."
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