ROBERT LEPAGE: LIPSYNCH/BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC

Robert Lepage's eight and a half hour Lipsynch running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this Fall is searing and funny.  Drawing upon formal elements very resonant of Arianne Mnouchkine's piece earlier this year, Lepage deploys vignettes, frames of storytelling, multiple interlocking narrative structures, mobile sets, flashbacks, mother and child themes, and the return to childhood as an overarching preoccupation.  There is startling similarity to both Lepage and Mnouchkine's shows this year: both open with the death of the mother, and the search for her story.  In Lepage's epic journey, the audience is made to commit to a theater of endurance.  You have to stay with the text's intricate flows to comprehend the confluence of random lives connected by six degrees of seperation.  In Lipsynch, the exquisite investigation of the structure of voice, speech, intonation, pitch, timbre, scale, magnitude and silence is a thrill to watch.  One is drawn into the mechanics of speech experimentation, led into the neural workings of the brain, while also being drawn deeper into the unresolved death and violence of crossed lives.  Dream like sequences transport the audience to the galactical spheres of Lepage's genius, while the excessive irony about filmmaking and its workings, distracted from the intensity of the long immersion into the pathways of memory and forgetting.