From the moon to a mother's death in a one-man show

Robert Lepage, the French-Canadian director, was walking in an alley in Quebec City when he had an epiphany. It came in the form of a discarded washing machine, but it was an epiphany nonetheless.

Lepage had been working on two different plays, one dealing with the 1960s race to the moon and the other arising out of the death of his mother. ''I really wanted to produce these two shows," he says, ''but I thought they would be one after the other." Then he saw, dumped in the trash, the giant, glass-fronted door of an old commercial washing machine.

''It was this extraordinary portal," Lepage says. ''And at first I couldn't tell if it was a washing machine or a part of a spaceship, you know? And it was literally the door into these two stories."

Thanks to that door -- which at once evoked for him the space program and his own first memory of going to a laundromat with his mother, where, he recalls, ''I had the impression that I was at Mission Control" -- Lepage turned the two plays into one. The result, a one-man show called ''the far side of the moon," has toured the world and now comes to the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, where it opens Friday.

In a way, the duality of this piece doesn't surprise Lepage. ''A lot of my work is very binary," he says, on the phone from Quebec. That split-image quality may grow out of his life in a bilingual culture, he says, ''but also my interest in Taoism. You need opposites -- not just to have a balanced existence, but to make a good story."

Here, the opposites are two brothers, an anxious academic and a shallow TV weatherman, each trying awkwardly to come to terms with their mother's death and their own estrangement. But the opposites are also the teams of Soviet and American astronauts who were racing each other to the moon. And it's all staged with a dizzying blend of video projections, puppetry, and a moodily evocative score by Laurie Anderson.

Lepage has sometimes been criticized for his heavy use of technology, though it was partly his dazzling technique that brought his first work, ''The Dragon's Trilogy," international acclaim when it premiered in 1985. And he says all the techno-wizardry employed by his company, Ex Machina, is always in service of the deeper meanings of his work. ''It's a vocabulary that's very visual and very physical," he says, ''but I try to avoid having these things be isolated: Here we have a bit of puppetry, and now a bit of video . . ."

But just what is the deeper meaning of ''far side"? Lepage laughs. ''My theory is that it is written with the audience," he says. ''The night of the opening, I start to understand what I was trying to do."

For him, Lepage explains, a work of theater evolves as it is played, taking on new meanings and colorations from the reactions of many different viewers. ''This makes my relationship with critics complicated," he says. ''They want to see it once and say what it is. But [critics] have to accept that whatever [they] write about it is going to be reinjected into the show. Theater should be like that -- more collaborative, instead of being like film, where it's 'done,' and then on opening night there's a guillotine that comes down and that's it, that's the final judgment on the show. Theater is such an ephemeral, organic thing."

The process of refinement continues, Lepage says, as the work tours from one country to another, taking on slightly different shadings in each culture. When ''far side" played in Seoul during a particularly tense moment in relations between North and South Korea, he says, the tensions heightened the emotions of the piece. And everywhere it has toured -- from New Zealand to Los Angeles to Norway to France -- it has subtly shifted in tone.

That shift becomes more dramatic, Lepage says, when he translates each piece he writes from his original language, French, into English. ''In that process of translation, I always discover new things," he says. ''Another language always has better ways of saying things. And you lose things, too. But it makes you see the work in a new way. And then when you go back to the French, you can't stay untouched by the English. You say, 'Well, in English we had a better way of expressing this.' So it's completely sculpted and polished by that process."

The movement from French to English isn't the only translation, notes Yves Jacques, who will perform ''far side" at the ART. He has been touring in the show for a year, playing it in both French and English. But even in France, he says, he had to translate, too.

''In Canada we played it in French-Canadian, with a lot of kind of slang French," Jacques says. In France, he would ''correct some expressions," he says, not just because French audiences ''don't want to make the effort" to understand Canadian slang but because ''a play, it goes fast. If you don't understand something, it's gone -- you can't go back."

It might seem odd that a deeply personal, even partly autobiographical one-man show like ''far side" is now being played by someone other than its creator. Indeed, for Lepage, who always begins by starring in his own shows, it's not just odd to imagine such a thing at first; it's downright impossible.

''At first, when I'm working on a show, somebody will say, 'Well, eventually, you'll be busy with something else and we'll need to get someone to play this,"' Lepage says. He's working on a new one-man show now, he says, and he's still at that stage. ''I can't see how somebody can replace me -- it's so personal."

But then, always, it shifts. ''I can never really tell at what moment it shifts," he says. ''But there's a moment where it becomes its own thing."

For Jacques, who is one of Canada's best-known film actors, ''it's an honor to replace Robert in the show," he says. On the phone from Paris, where two of his movies will open in a few weeks, he recalls his anxieties before meeting Lepage to rehearse for the first time.

''I wanted when I went to be very prepared," Jacques says. ''It was like meeting da Vinci for me. You know, other painters would prepare the canvas, do almost all of the painting, and then he would just add the final touch. So I tried to prepare the canvas. I tried to learn the script and then to learn all the movements; I worked with a video. So then when we met, we worked on real matters -- the emotion."

And it's the emotion, Lepage says, that moves him most when he watches Jacques perform his work.

''Emotionally, he's more involved in this than I was," Lepage says. ''I was emotionally involved, of course, as an actor, but I was also the director and I was doing a lot of the technical things; I had my eye looking at the show. He's much more -- inhabited? Haunted? I'm looking for the word in English; in French we would say 'inhabité' -- with the emotions of the show."

Watching Jacques, Lepage says, ''the show comes to fruition for me. It has all the ideas and the cleverness, but the acting is lush."

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.