Lippy. Abrons Arts Center (see Off Broadway). By Bush Moukarzel, Mark O’Halloran and Dead Centre. Directed by Ben Kidd. With ensemble cast. Running time: 1hr 15mins. No intermission.
Lippy: In brief
The Irish company Dead Centre visits NYC with its award-winning 2013 drama, which imagines the story behind the real-life case of a woman and her three nieces who starved themselves to death inside a boarded-up home. Troupe cofounders Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel direct, and fellow cofounder Adam Welsh designs the sound.
Lippy: Theater review by David Cote
For its latest devised piece, Dublin-based Dead Centre intercuts two sources. First is a grim case from 2000, in which an elderly woman and her three middle-aged nieces starved themselves to death in a sealed-up house in Ireland’s Leixlip, County Kildare. The other inspiration is clearly Samuel Beckett; the 75-minute Lippy ends with a bleak, existential rant delivered on video by a 20-foot-wide, garishly lit mouth. If the arc from silent, self-imposed starvation to a Not I–like mouth vomiting words is too broad, cowriters Bush Moukarzel and Mark O’Halloran insert a tantalizing bridge: the Lip Reader (Dan Reardon), who travels through the action bearing witness to horrors that he can only incorrectly translate.
Director Ben Kidd and designers Andrew Clancy (sets), Grace O’Hara (sets), Adam Welsh (sound) and Stephen Dodd (lighting) build an exquisitely executed series of interlocking chambers: mock-postshow chat becomes hazmat-suited workers at the women’s home, a nightmarish re-creation of their last weeks and the aforementioned video finale. You can pick out influences as varied as David Lynch, verbatim theater, Dennis Potter and Italian avant-auteur Romeo Castellucci. Thematically, they’re wrestling with the mystery and eeriness of human traces, symbolized by trash bags stuffed with shredded paper. Beckett might have said that our lives are the shreds—or perhaps the wind that blows between shredding.—Theater review by David Cote
THE BOTTOM LINE Silent or screaming, Lippy speaks volumes.
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