Apocalypse when? Robert Lepage's Zulu Time featured terrorists and exploding airplanes--and was set for a New York opening on September 21. A report from the premiere that never happened. (theater).

For Canadian theater and film director Robert Lepage, the historic events of September 11 were given an extra layer of the surreal due to the show he was preparing for its New York premiere. Lepage was set to launch Zulu Time, which was being coproduced by rock Peter Gabriel, the week following the terrorist attacks. But fate would intervene in a bizarre collision of art and reality.

The multimedia theatrical work, which Lepage refers to as a "techno-cabaret." was set largely in airports and was inspired in part by Lepage's own fear and dislike of flying. Typical for Lepage, the play was cryptic, though many of its themes and plot points were clear. Middle Eastern terrorists played a prominent role in the show, which was punctuated with big-screen images of news footage of actual plane crashes. The final plot point was an apocalyptic plane crash caused by terrorist hijackers.

The Quebec City-based Lepage, who is openly gay, concedes that the show, which was canceled on the afternoon of September 11, was freakily and eerily prescient. "I don't want to sound pretentious or anything," he says. "But you know, our company [Lepage's theater troupe, Ex Machina], when we immerse ourselves in new work, sometimes things like this happen. I'm not saying we have psychic powers but there are moments where we're obsessed with things that are going on. Any subject matter that we treat, we find a reflection of." Lepage adds that some of the art-and-life overlap is inevitable. "If you spend three years devising a piece, chances are, some of the discussions you've had, the ideas you've come up with, will actually happen."

Lepage has often drawn on social issues for inspiration, though he has eschewed easy messages and instead chooses the abstract in his work. A visit to Hiroshima led him to become fixated on the effects of the first, nuclear bomb ever dropped at the end of World War II. The visit was part of the inspiration for his seven-hour opus, Seven Branches of the River Ota, which also included themes of the Holocaust and AIDS--and which played to sellout crowds across North America and Europe in the mid '90s.

Zulu Time had Lepage doing exhaustive research into terrorist activity. "The thing that was really strange was that we had an element where there was a bomb on the plane," he says. "I was working on getting information on terrorism, and I spoke with political science professors to ask, `If a flight were to blow up today, who would be responsible for that?' So we spent a week researching terrorist training camps in Kashmir, looking into suicide commandos, totally immersed in this subject matter. We kept wondering if we had the right turban, if the guy would wear a beard. Then we sent all of this stuff off to New York just five days before the attacks."

Prescient, for sure--which would raise the question: What is Lepage's next project about? Just as the tourism industry seems to be suffering its worst downturn ever--a direct result of the September 11 attacks--Lepage is venturing to make a film titled simply Tourism. But it isn't about the industry, Lepage explains. "It's about vampires mid cannibalism. Not in the Dracula sense, but in the way in which we suck each other's blood and feed off of each other. With time it became about organ trafficking."

Hays is the associate editor of the Montreal Mirror and a columnist for The [Toronto] Globe and Mail.