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Robert Lepage's 1987 play was a boon for Quebec City's Chinese community

Robert Lepage's 1987 play was a boon for Quebec City's Chinese community

Quebec City playwright Robert Lepage may be in hot water over perceptions of racial insensitivity in the staging of his more recent plays.

But his 1987 play, The Dragons Trilogy, earned him support from the city's Chinese community.

Much of Quebec City's Chinatown was expropriated in the late 1960s to build the Dufferin-Montmorency Expressway.

The Dragons Trilogy opens in a parking lot in what used to be Quebec City's Chinatown, with an exchange in French, English and Cantonese.

"When I was young there used to be houses here," says a character known as Voice 2. Adding, "It used to be Chinatown."

Voice 1: "Today, it's a parking lot."

Voice 2: "Maybe later, it will become a park, a train station, or a cemetery."

Lepage is already embroiled in two cases of alleged cultural appropriation

Only two of the six-member vocal cast of his SLĀV, a Montreal Jazz Festival show commemorating the music of black American slaves, were black.

Also, he's been criticized for not including any Indigenous actors in the Paris performance of Kanata, a show about Indigenous people.

Lepage held a news conference in 2007 to mark the 20th anniversary of The Dragons Trilogy in the Wok 'n Roll restaurant, recalled Michel Parent, a local historian, whose area of interest is Quebec City's Chinese community.

​The play "had a big impact on the thinking of people in Quebec City," Parent said, adding that Lepage has referred to the restaurant as "the soul of the Chinese community."​