Gaëtan

This project emerges from the meeting point between personal history and History with a capital H.

A theatrical creation that brings together the personal memory of Robert Lepage and our collective memory surrounding the figure of Gaëtan Dugas, long — and wrongly — associated with the label of “patient zero” of the AIDS epidemic.

Following the funeral of his aunt, who passed away from Covid-19, Robert unexpectedly discovers the grave of Gaëtan Dugas. This chance encounter becomes the starting point of a journey between intimate memory and collective history. The dramaturgy unfolds across three timelines: the 1980s, marked by the emergence of AIDS; the year 1983, during which Robert tours across Canada with his theatre company; and finally, 2020, struck by a global pandemic that revives fears, reflexes, and stigmas. Blending documentary and fiction, the narrative retraces Gaëtan Dugas’ journey — from his adolescence in Quebec City to his life as a flight attendant for Air Canada, leading up to his death in 1984. Yet it is above all through the narrator’s perspective that the dramaturgy takes shape: a gaze that confronts personal memories with collective narratives, and the ghosts of the past with the anxieties of the present.

A work that brings different eras into dialogue, where the lucidity of the mature man intersects with the carefree spirit of youth in the 1980s and the vulnerability revealed by the contemporary pandemic. A deeply human journey through memory, stigma, and our enduring need to give a face to collective catastrophes.