Ryan M. Davis

Lipsynch by Robert Lepage, present at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival, October 2009.

A nostalgic woman hires an actor to dub some old reels of eight-millimeter film, imitating her late father’s voice. Take after take, the actor’s intonations sound out of place and cartoonish, until the frustrated woman steps before the microphone herself, and, in one miraculous moment, her father’s blessing resounds from her throat. Only flesh and blood could channel the exact timbre and his true character. This scene encapsulates a meditation on the voice rehashed frequently over the course of Lipsynch, in which Robert Lepage stages a sprawling narrative composed of nine acts following the intersecting lives of a multinational cast of characters. This uneven theatrical epic—sometimes elegant, sometimes exasperating—contemplates the human voice’s individuality, in senses physiological and metaphysical, and the voice’s transcendent capacity for connection. 

“Something is there, manifest and stubborn,” says Roland Barthes of the voice, “brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages,” suggesting the voice is rooted in the peculiarities of a body and its history. That “something” Barthes calls the “grain of the voice.” It’s the inimitable quality in every human resonance, signaling the sound’s origins in the bellows, the glottal pulses, the tongue’s writhing against teeth—all the organs that generate, shape, and amplify. Barthes’s concept reverberates throughout Lipsynch’s nearly nine hours. In one segment, a Glaswegian homicide detective named Jackson tracks down a suspect, identifying her based on the distinctive traits of her voice and speech. In another, the neurosurgeon Thomas informs jazz singer Marie that her operation will render her temporarily aphasic; but he assures her that, though her ability to articulate lyrics may vanish, the soul of her song she cannot be stripped from her body. Indeed, we encounter her later, sitting in front of recording equipment, her head bandaged, panting rhythmically and humming consonant-less harmonies to layer a haunting song—expressive, if inarticulate. The opening act features the central relationship that links the play’s multiple stories, capturing, perhaps more poetically than literally, Barthes’s notion of the grain. Jeremy, a young man adopted as an infant by the benevolent opera singer Ada, leaves the home that has shaped him in order to unearth the history of his biological mother and discover simultaneously his natural artistic voice.

Lipsynch is most compelling when Robert Lepage—the French Canadian director of the company Ex Machina, known for his sweeping visual aesthetic—celebrates theatricality while exploring the panoply of oral communication.  With a touch of staging wizardry, Lepage is capable of transporting the audience to innumerable locations over a seventy-year span, using a handful of modular set pieces that shape-shift into projection screens, recording studios, a plane fuselage, the London tube, and watering holes seedy and upscale. Lipsynch most effectively probes the ontology of the voice when Lepage’s stagecraft subverts electronic media as the purveyor of vocal essence. When the set reconfigures as a jazz lounge, the singer Marie renders the standard “April in Paris” with exquisite, pain-ravaged howls. The scene plays projected on the screen behind her with a piano at her side, but it’s an optical illusion. The stage decomposes the image into wooden fragments and a slim keyboard, but the camera can’t help reassembling the pieces into the false likeness of a piano. The image on the wall cannot be trusted to genuinely sync sound and image, but the singer’s body before us is inseparable from her unmistakable voice, “as though a single skin lined the inner flesh of the performer and the music (s)he sings.” (Barthes)

For Lepage, the visual can only be connected to the vocal with any certainty in the presence inherent to live theater, and he shows us this again with several gender-bending travesties. When the stage again morphs into a BBC radio-station, we see a panel brought together to discuss prostitution. The whole conversation is recorded, and the actors perform a titular lip-sync to the track. Though obviously only mouthed, the voices we hear seem to suit the bodies and gestures of the actors—except for one. Among its speakers, we hear, is a strapping gigolo, who is played by an incongruously dainty woman in men’s garb and glued-on facial hair.  The body comically fails to match the voice. In another shop-stopping performance, we witness the interview of an octogenarian speech therapist succumbing to dementia. Again, the body onstage is irreconcilable with the recording we hear, despite the virtuosic performance. Even when the camera zooms in for a close-up of the male actor—who captures every rattle and blank expression with precision, and who’s made up so convincingly as to be this exact crone—something reads incommensurate between the voice we hear and the body we see onstage. Though her speech is clearly failing her to the point of losing time, place, and identity, this old woman’s voice locates a body exactly—and it’s not the one sipping tea in front of us.

There are moments when Lipsynch exploits the live theater to reveal the cerebral complexities of speech. In Lepage’s most visually rich sequence, the set transforms into the snowy exterior of a Quebec bookshop. Inside, Marie’s sister Michelle struggles to busy herself with mundane duties as clerk after recovering from a mental break. The scene is a serene pantomime, played out in silence and seen through the frosted windowpanes. But outside her menacing hallucinations creep until the scene repeats from the inside out, when the set wheels around, and we hear Michelle going about her quotidian business and recommending books by this poet or that. The phantasmal world outside, monstrous and ineffable, is kept at bay by her easily articulated routine and by the poetry that connects her with others.

Unfortunately, such elegant moments of theatrical ingenuity in Lipsynch are the exception rather than the rule. Lepage has, admittedly, sacrificed his usually expansive visual splendor to a thematic under-pinning that only seldom gets rigorous treatment. “Up until now, our work at Ex Machina had been focused mainly on telling stories using image, movement, space and music,” he writes in the program note. “The voice is an internal machinery that finds its ultimate expression outside of the body, but in order to examine it and try to understand it properly one needs to pull away from visual stimuli for a while and go where the voice is ‘seated.’” This translates into narratives developed more through language, and ostensibly Lipsynch’s linguistically versatile cast—who wrote the play in collaboration with Lepage and dramaturg Marie Gignac—should be up to the challenge. But dialogue is insubstantial and directionless, except when reiterating the theme. Scenarios devolve quickly into thin soap opera cliché (Jeremy flings the kiss of death “You’re not my father!” at his adoptive mother Ada’s lover and storms off to San Francisco to study film) or, at the show’s nadir, tele-novella farce (the Central American sound designer Sebastian returns home for his father’s funeral, where the deepest tragedy is the flatulent corpse).

Lipsynch’s heaviest burden, however, is its tandem-narrative construction. Frequently forfeiting dramatic excellence for thematic adherence, Lepage and co. create nine equally-weighted, interconnected stories. These multiple narratives—spanning nations and decades—are bound by a hope of demonstrating the universal capacity of the voice—and by extension, the individual—to reach beyond itself toward others. From the opening aria from Gorecki’s Symphony no. 3, sung full of longing by Ada, into the scene aboard an intercontinental flight where the infant Jeremy, wrapped in his dead mother’s arms, cries out with the primal resonance of loss; and through each character’s episode of desperate attempts to connect vocally (Ada to Jeremy by teaching him to sing, Thomas to Marie, Marie to her late father or to her sister Michelle, etc.) the play casts an enormous net. This superstructure, however, proves too unwieldy and overwhelms the flimsy connective tissues of dialogue and characterization that have taken precedence as modes of storytelling.

Though Lipsynch strives toward a universal experience, that universality only ends up pointing toward itself as each overlap in the weave becomes the center of attention. Characters and their transformations are onstage simply to be tracked like the set pieces, and the only reason to stick around for the ninth act is to find out how Jeremy’s birth mother ended up on that plane to kindle the whole drama in the first place, or perhaps to hear Gorecki one more time.