In any given production, what really jump-starts Robert Lepage’s freewheeling and capacious imagination are the visual and technical possibilities.
On that score, the Canadian playwright-director emphatically delivers in “Needles and Opium,’’ a fantasia on a pair of cultural giants — Jean Cocteau and Miles Davis — that opened Thursday night at Cutler Majestic Theatre for a brief run that ends Sunday.
Lepage is not your man if you hunger for a linear story line or sustained depth of characterization. The narrative in “Needles and Opium’’ is meager and scattershot, the dialogue tends toward abstraction, and one of the three principal characters is, frankly, kind of annoying. There are sluggish interludes and pockets of pretentiousness.
But you will see things in this production that are likely to linger in the memory for a good long while. Lepage’s appetite is for concept, image, and metaphor, and there are few more original in those realms.
His inspiration is the historical coincidence that in 1949 Cocteau, the French filmmaker and playwright, played here by Marc Labreche, was visiting New York at the same time that Davis, the African-American jazz legend, portrayed here by Wellesley Robertson III, was discovering Paris.
Lepage has created a series of vignettes that cut back and forth between those two figures and a third, a fictional Quebecois actor named Robert (Labreche), who is in Paris to do voice-over on a documentary while reeling from a devastating breakup.
The documentary is about Davis and the French actress-singer Juliette Greco, with whom the trumpeter fell in love while on his sojourn in Paris. Davis ultimately decided he could not bring Greco back to America with him, partly because of this nation’s prejudice against interracial relationships. In “Needles and Opium,’’ Davis turns to heroin to cope with the loss.
However, the attempt to draw parallels between the losses experienced by Davis and by Robert falls flat, largely because there’s little compelling about the latter’s suffering. Robert is wearisome company. Matters improve considerably, though, when attention turns to Davis and Cocteau.
Lepage’s modus operandi is essentially to invite us into his dreams. “Needles and Opium’’ transpires on a steadily rotating, three-sided cube. Attached to wires and harnesses, Labreche and Robertson hang suspended in midair, slowly somersault, or float from one video- or set-generated location to another.
The overall effect of this exercise in metaphysical acrobatics is hypnotizing, and some of the imagery nearly takes your breath away. At one point, Lebreche floats in front of a vast blanket of stars, the entire cosmos at his back. Later, Robertson extends outward from the rotating cube at a 90-degree angle, a trumpet against his lips, the picture of professionalism and committed artistry, as if to say that nothing could shake Miles.
As with Lepage’s “The Andersen Project,’’ a work inspired by Hans Christian Andersen that was performed in 2012 at the Cutler Majestic, “Needles and Opium’’ is shot through with images of loneliness and solitude and meditations on the creative life.
In writing the script, Lepage drew from Cocteau’s “A Letter to Americans.’’ Addressing America, Labreche’s Cocteau says: “You don’t allow your artists to experiment. You ask that they repeat themselves.’’ Largely true then, largely true now. (When he’s in character as Cocteau, Labreche employs a thick French accent that sometimes makes him hard to understand.)
It was smart of Lepage to rework “Needles and Opium,’’ originally a solo piece performed in the early 1990s, to add the character of Davis, though it would have been even better if Miles had lines. You’ve got to admire Lepage’s willingness to dive back into the piece in an attempt to strengthen it, and, more broadly, his career-long determination to break new ground.
When I interviewed him in Cambridge three years ago, I asked Lepage about the balancing act between the theatrical need to serve the story and his strong attraction to technological innovation, and how he keeps the latter from overwhelming the former.
“Well, sometimes I succeed in it, sometimes I don’t,’’ he replied candidly. “But that’s part of building a Boeing 747. Chances are it’s going to fly on a wing and a prayer. It’s risk-taking. But I’m very, very enthusiastic about all the new tools out there, whether it’s high-tech or low-tech. They just shed a different light on whatever story you’re trying to tell.’’
Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.