Written, directed, and performed by Robert Lepage. An Ex Machina production, presented by SFU Woodward’s and Théàtre la Seizième. At the Milton and Fei Wong Experimental Theatre in the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts at SFU Woodward's on Friday, February 12. Continues until February 21 

Vancouver, you have been given an incredible gift. 887 is a rare experience, a play about memory that those lucky enough to see it will never forget.

The play features the type of theatrical wizardry that creator-performer Robert Lepage is internationally famous for, but the first hint that he’s made something more intimate with 887 comes when he walks on-stage to give the curtain speech himself. He then segues into a story about being asked to perform—and therefore memorize—an iconic poem from Quebec’s Quiet Revolution in the 1960s. Invoking the concept of the memory palace, Lepage brings out a scale model of the apartment building in Quebec City where he lived as a child. (The play’s title comes from the building’s address.) As Lepage describes his neighbours, we see them—through a combination of props and projections—coming to life inside the miniature apartments.

It’s impossible to overstate how dazzling and delightful these effects are. But the details in Lepage’s down-to-earth storytelling work their own simple magic: the unruly boys in the “gorilla family” one floor down are rumoured to have been conceived while their mother was working at the zoo; an aspiring young pop star upstairs was born in front of a crowd of medical students, leading to his lifelong taste for an audience. And in his building, Lepage finds a microcosm of Quebec society at the time: 80 percent francophone, 20 percent anglophone, the residents equally divided in political affiliation.

This marriage of simplicity and complexity, of the personal and political, drives the entire show. Lepage shares his family’s story—his father worked as a taxi driver to support his wife, four children, and the grandmother stricken with dementia who shared their apartment—alongside a brief primer in Quebec history and highlights of its 1960s transformation, culminating in the militant separatism of the FLQ.

Much of his narration is delivered in subtly rhymed verse, in contrast to the Automatiste style of the poem—Michèle Lalonde’s “Speak White”—that he’s struggling to learn by heart.

One of the play’s central motifs is transformation—historical, personal, and narrative—a notion that underpins its staging. Lepage turns the apartment building to one side and unfolds the walls of his spacious, contemporary kitchen. Another spin and we’re in a lonely 1960s diner late at night. A projected illustration of the brain’s hemispheres morphs into a blueprint of two adjacent apartments; fireworks thicken into neurons; a bunk bed becomes a theatre. The surprises never stop, but they’re always on a human scale. There’s an incredible tenderness in the way Lepage interacts with the dollhouse world, sometimes with the camera on his phone, sometimes by reaching in his hand, treating memory with the gentlest of caresses.

887’s two hours are packed with indelible images and thought-provoking reflections on the nature of family, identity, and culture. These memories started as Lepage’s, but now they’re ours, too, and I’m deeply, deeply grateful.