From internationally acclaimed playwright and author Robert Lepage comes 887 — an autobiographical story originally toured as a solo show. Framed by Lepage’s attempt to memorize Michèle Lalonde’s poem “Speak White,” 887 is an exploration of memory, culture, and community in Quebec.

As the 40th anniversary of La Nuit de la poésie in Montreal approaches, playwright Robert Lepage is invited to recite Michèle Lalonde’s seminal poem “Speak White” from memory on the special night. After agonizing hours spent attempting to memorize the piece, Lepage finds himself unable to recall a single line. In a last effort he decides to employ a mnemonic device dating back to ancient Greece called the Memory Palace — a technique of imagination and association. Lepage’s Memory Palace is 887 Murray Avenue, the apartment block where he grew up. Winding his way around the rooms of the building and the lives of the tenants therein, Lepage guides the reader through a world of recollections of 1960s Quebec, the decade that shaped the province’s cultural and political consciousness.

A mesmerizing and multifaceted glimpse into the realm of memory, 887 is a tour of culture and community in 1960s Quebec through one masterful artist’s remarkable, boundary-defying perspective.

Hailed by international critics, Robert Lepage's original, contemporary, and unusual works, inspired by recent history, transcend borders and challenge the standards of scenic writing, particularly through the use of new technologies.

The year 1994 marks an important step in his career: he founds Ex Machina, a multidisciplinary creation company of which he is the artistic director. Also under his leadership, the multidisciplinary production center, La Caserne, is created in June 1997, in Quebec City. This last creative space sees the birth of almost all of Ex Machina’s productions until 2019.

Robert Lepage’s visionary side and will to create led him to promote and implement the construction of Le Diamant theatre in the heart of Quebec City. Inaugurated in August 2019, this new and unique cultural venue is intended to be an anchor point for the public, emerging artists and creators from all horizons.

His most significant works include, the plays, The Seven Streams of the River Ota and The Dragons’ Trilogy; his solos, The Far Side of the Moon and 887; the operas, The Damnation of Faust and Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle; his multimedia works, The Image Mill and The Library at Night; Peter Gabriel’s shows, The Secret World Tour and The Growing Up Tour; and with Cirque du Soleil, KÀ and TOTEM.

Robert Lepage's profile page

LOUISA BLAIR is a native of Quebec City who now work as a writer, editor and translator in Toronto.

Louisa Blair's profile page

• Runner-up, Governor General's Literary Award for Translation
• Commended, New York Times Critic's Pick

A work that delights, mesmerizes and provokes.

Variety

[A]mazing … resonant storytelling … it demands to be seen.

Globe and Mail

[F]or these 125 minutes, magic is possible. Lepage’s masterful command of storytelling, through his physical performance as well as his theatrical trickery, creates a world that’s enveloping, pulling you from one moment to the next, even as it bounces through time.

Toronto Star

[A] work that delights, mesmerizes and provokes.

Variety

Seductive, brazen . . . Raw emotional force builds from the accretion of slight moments of remembrance and discovery.

New York Times

Touching, intimate, powerful.

Guardian

[S]eductive, brazen … Raw emotional force builds from the accretion of slight moments of remembrance and discovery.

New York Times

The passions are internal, the ideas buried like depth charges to detonate later… Lepage sifts through his own past and his country's and, like theatre artists through the ages, transforms what he finds into stage magic.

NOW Magazine

[E]lectrifying

Independent