LIPSYNCH directed by Robert Lepage, written by Lepage with the cast (Ex Machina). Runs to June 14, Saturday-Sunday 1 pm (complete, with four intermissions and one extended break) or Tuesday-Thursday 7 pm (in three parts, each with an intermission). $75-$125. 416-872-1111, luminato.com. See listing. Rating: NNNNN
Don’t let the nine-hour total running time of Robert Lepage’s Lipsynch scare you. It’s a completely immersive experience, featuring the rich narrative of an unputdownable novel and the kind of brilliant theatricality we’ve come to expect of Lepage and his Ex Machina company for decades.
On a flight from Frankfurt to Montreal, a nameless young woman dies, leaving behind a wailing baby boy. That striking opening incident alters the lives of the nine main characters (there are dozens of secondary ones) who inhabit the show and get a section named after them.
A passenger named Ada (Rebecca Blankenship) looks into the case and eventually adopts the boy, named Jeremy (Rick Miller), who later grows up resentful and questions his parentage. Ada marries Thomas (Hans Piesbergen), an Austrian neurosurgeon, who operates on a Montreal singer named Marie (Fredericke Bedard), whose sister, Michelle (Lisa Castonguay), suffers from an unnamed mental illness. And so on.
There is a soap opera-ish quality to the plot, but it’s soap manufactured and lathered on by brilliant artists.
The title image weaves through the entire show, sometimes literally and other times suggestively. Characters have no voice, characters change their voice, characters provide voiceovers. In one of the most moving sections involving the mentally ill Michelle, characters finally find their internal voice.
No surprise that Lepage uses technology to explore this theme brilliantly. In one sequence, Marie, who’s lost her ability to speak words but can produce vowels (an image planted several sections earlier), records separate lines on a musical track, eventually creating a layered and haunting bit of music that sounds like a Gregorian chant.
Later, Marie, obsessed (just like Jeremy) with a parent she knows little about, wants to discover what her long-deceased father is saying in a series of old home movies, so she hires a deaf woman to read the father’s lips.
In another scene, a movie sequence that is hysterically funny (like much of the show) when being “filmed” becomes quite touching when an actor records her dialogue in a looping session.
Lepage, who created the work with the nine actors, is exploring how art and language can capture, distort or enhance real life.
That sounds more cerebral than it plays. The emotional richness comes from the theme of parents and children. There are adoptive parents, abusive ones, surrogate ones, loving ones, clinging ones, and absent ones.
The opening and closing moments, which make full use of Blankenship’s stately, earth-motherish presence and rich operatic voice, are chilling in their dignity and sorrow.
The design of the piece (sets by Jean Hazel, lighting by Etienne Boucher) is stunning without being ostentatious. There’s an honest use of simple elements to create maximum magic. Rounded panels that effectively recreate the ghostly interior of an airplane are later resourced to become the rounded panels of a London radio studio. A couple of straight panelled walls are arranged and rearranged, most surprisingly (and amusingly) in a sequence involving a funeral home.
In one curious sequence, Lepage creates the semblage of a real set by tricking the eye with a video camera and some pieces of strategically placed wood. This isn’t virtuosity for its own sake. When the scene finally ends, the character crashes through the “set” in a way that says lots about his emotional state of mind.
Although it’s easy to imagine a slightly shorter version (one or two characters could disappear), I wouldn’t want to rob the piece of its impressive performances. Nuna Garcia is excellent as a young, naïve Nicaraguan woman but also as a coy actor who sleeps with most of the men involved in a film she’s making. Bedard and Castonguay are touching as two very different sisters. Miller, easily one of Canada’s most versatile artists, gets to show off a number of languages and accents and lots of emotional range.
About those nine hours. You won’t ever be bored, and the breaks are well-spaced. What’s hilarious is that at each subsequent intermission, the audience gets more and more animated, discussing what came before and what’s coming up with the same enthusiasm they’d analyze an episode of Lost or Heroes at the water cooler.
My only concern is the extended break of 45 minutes is a little short to get something decent to eat. Still, I’d suggest seeing the show in one of the two remaining all-day performances rather than over three consecutive nights. You need to fully immerse yourself in the show for the images and motifs to work their way into your subconscious.
And of course, once you get hooked on the first few episodes – er, scenes – you’ll want to keep going back to find out what happens. [rssbreak]
