Showed Up, with Seth Colter Walls: Robert Lepage's "Lipsynch" at BAM

Late one evening last week, while seated on the Wall Street 2/3 subway platform, a 30-something Caucasian woman in glasses and sweatpants interrupted my reading of Taylor Branch's The Clinton Tapes.

"Excuse me," she said. "Can I ask you a question?"

"Surely," I replied, probably a little over-happy because my life is plainly more enjoyable than Bill Clinton's was when he was president.

"Oh," the woman said, stopping herself. "Are you a New Yorker?"

"Yes," I replied. "Why do you ask?"

"Because your hair is neat and you said 'surely.'"

"Oh. Well, yes, I live in New York. But that wasn't your original question. What's up?" I said, eager to move this subway conversation along.

"Tell me what I am," she said.

I blinked dumbly, even though I was beginning to understand what she was asking me to do. "Go ahead, be brutal," she said. "On a scale from 1 to 10."

With 10 being what, exactly? Deneuve in her prime? And 1 being what? The unemployably disfigured? I did not ask these questions—and I all of a sudden wondered where my train was.

"Six!" I blurted, thinking it a number neither off-the-charts patronizing nor unduly insulting. In all honesty, it was hard to get a read. (Sweats maybe aren't the best choice if you're gonna walk around the city asking to be rated.)

"Oh, that's harsh," she said, stumbling backward toward the stairs as though she'd been struck. "You didn't sugar-coat that six, did you?"

"No," I lied. "You asked me for the truth, and I gave it to you."

"Oh, six," she said, turning to walk up the stairs and out of the station.

While the heterosexual male instinct is to judge any conversation initiated by a woman as a sexual approach—even if it is on the phone and the subject happens to be one's infrequent credit card payments—I had no idea what had happened in that moment, and I still don't.

That is to say, language proved insufficient in defining the contours of our interaction. Banal, maybe, but true. I'd give something of value to have the moment back—to expand or revisit it somehow so that she knew, at the least, that I meant her no harm. (I'd have bumped her up to a 9 if I realized my answer had the potential to make or break her evening.)

I thought about this be-sweatpantsed woman more than a few times during "Lipsynch," Robert Lepage's eight-plus hour theater/video/musical gesamtkunstwerk, which is at BAM this week—and which you still have time to catch in a marathon session on both Saturday and Sunday. Basically, because I think it's worth seeing, I don't want to spoil the narrative for you. It's more consistently engaging than any 8-hour thing has a right to be.

Lepage's stage wizardry features sets that collapse and expand, mid-act, into locales as different as an airplane, the London tube, a film set, a radio studio, a disco. The effect is both technically awesome and, somehow, emotionally communicative about the fluid geography of thoughts and intentions. The piped-in music Lepage has picked ranges from Gorecki's Symphony No. 3 to blah metal (not kidding), and from Joy Division to a couple Bacharach tunes—all of which are employed pretty tastefully. Sometimes the actors are lip-synching to pre-recorded tracks of their lines, and sometimes we're given to understand that this is the case. Other times, it's not totally clear.

The macro story is one common to a lot of fancy-pants filmmaking (think Altman or, guh, Paul Thomas Anderson, if you must). By this I mean we're talking about the contingency and chance of human relationships—how they come together, how they fall apart, who tells whom what (or not) and how/why. We travel, across decades, from pre-Civil War Nicaragua to contemporary London, with stopovers in Germany and Quebec. In each act, the voice (or lack thereof) is undermined in ways that could seem pretentious, I guess, if you're the type for whom pretentiousness is a thing to be guarded against so zealously that enjoying modern things is rather out of the question. Or else if you're the kind of person for whom any new innovation in staging requires light-year advances in explicit meaning, lest the advances show that the artists are all hollow inside—which is how critic Charles Isherwood seemed to suggest you should think of a theatrical work this purposefully diffuse in the Times last week. After noting a) "the flawless acting," b) that Lepage's direction is "abundant in startling moments of fine stagecraft" and c) that "printed words do not go far in conveying the excitements of such imagery onstage," he then decides d) it's not worth it for you to go check out, because its conceptual underpinnings "register lightly and are not fully dramatized." Which is to say, you meet a complex thing, give it the once-over, and then must rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, in terms of whether or not it's worth your time. NEXT!

Or else maybe not, sometimes.