Playing Cards 1 Spades Roundhouse

French-Canadian director Robert Lepage’s two-and-a-half hour epic, without interval, set in Las Vegas and the surrounding desert, has been created specifically for a circular performance space. The actors enter from under the high-standing drum-like stage. There are 36 trapdoors. The actual mechanics of the staging are always so much more interesting than the action itself. The verbal high spot is the retelling of a legendary story in which a soldier on active service uses a deck of cards as his Almanac, Bible and Prayer Book.