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Lipsynch review
This is a play review. The play is about, among other things, rape and prostitution. This review may not be a reading experience everyone wants to have (both for my furious incoherence and the fact that at least one scene description herein is triggery as hell). You've been warned.
Yesterday, Patty and I went to see Lipsynch at BAM. This was essentially 10 hours of theater presented on a single day and while it was one of the most technically perfect things I've ever seen (smart, fascinating sets, amazing performances and really tight structure using a format (separate stories come together) that usually doesn't work well), it was also one of the most offensive.
If you pause now, to look up some reviews of this thing, you'll see lots of people calling it "a play about exploitation that isn't exploitative" (Patty found that one last night), but we were both pretty appalled by it, and ultimately, I thought it was more a product of (and a capitulation to) rape culture than anything about fighting or exposing the same.
A young woman on an airplane dies. In her arms is a young baby. An older woman, an opera singer on the plane spends a great deal of time tracking the baby down (this includes going on a date with a clerk at the border patrol office handling the thing) and eventually adopts him. The baby's mother was a prostitute.
The boy grows up. Leaves home when the adoptive mother and the boyfriend (now a doctor, he'd just been paying his way through medical school) move in together. He goes to Nicaragua to find out more about his mother; he has never been told she was a whore. The mother's uncle is there, and lies to him.
The boy becomes a film director. A woman needs a brain tumor removed. Her doctor is the adoptive mother's boyfriend, he moves out to be with her. After she recovers she dubs the boy's films.
The sound studio is owned by two men. One is a BBC radio announcer who was once from Manchester and had a different name. His sister, a former street prostitute who now works as a housekeeper for the aging speech therapist who helps the opera signer adoptive mother with her stutter that was a product of the war, goes on a radio program to talk about her experiences. She sees him and begins stalking him. She says he raped her. He says she wanted it and that their father then raped him in retaliation. He is hit by a train and killed -- murder, accident or suicide?
There is a Scotland Yard detctive investigating. His wife is leaving him so he asks all his female coworkers to go to the dance classes he booked with him. They turn him down; it wouldn't be appropriate. Later they apologize for being brusque. Eventually he finds the sister of the dead BBC guy; the speech therapist has died and she's gone back to selling herself. Mr. Scotland Yard brings her back for trial, but not before they talk for a long time. He just needs someone to talk to.
Eventually the adoptive boy finds out the truth about his mother. That she was sold into prostitution by her uncle. That she escaped with the help of a feminist lesbian filmmaker. That his adoptive mother adopted him because the filmmaker felt her career meant she couldn't raise a child, that there is an implication that the opera singer got the woman to agree to let her adopt him by donating to her films.
Okay, that leaves a lot out, but that should be enough for the following rant to make sense (and you know I'm pissed when I number my points):
1. Women essentially had only two roles in this play: mothers and whores
2. Every time prostitution was talked about or displayed on stage it was done so in a way that was both inaccurate and designed to titillate.
3. At one point we see street prostitutes approach a car to do business. The blocking and music are designed to make their progress towards the car seem a threatening advance. Bullshit.
4. One large chunk of the play is an actual BBC interview featuring a female street prostitute and a male escort who says he services only female clients and only fucks them if he wants to. Okay, the interview is real, but the idea that this male perspective is a useful, valid or even true counterpoint to the experience of the female street prostitute is bullshit. Male prostitutes mostly serve male clients. Period. Anything else is a romanticizing lie, and I just watched nine fucking hours of theater built around that lie.
5. Women pay for the opportunity to by mothers by sacrificing their careers. Women in the play who continue to have careers surrender babies. Everything is buying and selling and really offensive absolutes.
6. There is repeated eroticization of mother figures by sons -- people date people repeatedly because they remind them of their mothers. Women are constantly reassuring and rocking men who are entitled, incompetent philanders in their arms, because it is apparently the job of women to salve the wounds of men.
7. Rape is enacted on stage in a way that is meant to be titillating. Repeatedly. A naked male torso has a video camera trained on it. The man punches his nipples, sticks his hands down his pants -- this is then projected onto the leotard-clad body of the dead prostitute mother. So men raping women sold into prostitution are men committing self harm? I need to feel bad for the men here because of their desire for drugged and raped 15-year-olds? This whole play is about rape and prostitution so that we can feel bad for the men?
8. At the end of the play the gay woman rescues the dead mother prostitute and then the adoptive mother of the boy picks up this actress in her arms like a baby, and then passes this dead mother figure to the boy, who then also cradles her in his arms and then they finish in a tableau like the Pieta that makes the dead prostitute mother Jesus. Really? We're going to just hand the kidnapped, drugged and raped prostitute character around and say that this is good, she's been saved and has sacrificed nobly for the men of this narrative and that's going to make us feel good about these things?
I'm really not doing this justice, but holy shit, the offensive messages of this clusterfuck included the idea that only "mentally ill people can be artists," (also that "all mentally ill people are artists") and that we should feel sympathy and compassion for men in privileged positions (doctors, executives) when the women that are subordinate to them rebuff their advances. The play lied repeatedly about the realities of sex work and glamorized and eroticized it even at its most brutal levels. It repeatedly informed us that male pain was more important than female pain, that women were designed to endure and sacrifice and that when rape happens to men it's more important than rape that happens to women.
And then, at the end, instead of saying "wow, the whole planet is fucked up no matter who you are" or saying "ugh, this is horrible how we treat people and the double standards" it told us this was all a beautiful noble thing and we must love women for their great sacrifices on the altar of ... something.
I have never so wanted to punch a play in the face.
Yesterday, Patty and I went to see Lipsynch at BAM. This was essentially 10 hours of theater presented on a single day and while it was one of the most technically perfect things I've ever seen (smart, fascinating sets, amazing performances and really tight structure using a format (separate stories come together) that usually doesn't work well), it was also one of the most offensive.
If you pause now, to look up some reviews of this thing, you'll see lots of people calling it "a play about exploitation that isn't exploitative" (Patty found that one last night), but we were both pretty appalled by it, and ultimately, I thought it was more a product of (and a capitulation to) rape culture than anything about fighting or exposing the same.
A young woman on an airplane dies. In her arms is a young baby. An older woman, an opera singer on the plane spends a great deal of time tracking the baby down (this includes going on a date with a clerk at the border patrol office handling the thing) and eventually adopts him. The baby's mother was a prostitute.
The boy grows up. Leaves home when the adoptive mother and the boyfriend (now a doctor, he'd just been paying his way through medical school) move in together. He goes to Nicaragua to find out more about his mother; he has never been told she was a whore. The mother's uncle is there, and lies to him.
The boy becomes a film director. A woman needs a brain tumor removed. Her doctor is the adoptive mother's boyfriend, he moves out to be with her. After she recovers she dubs the boy's films.
The sound studio is owned by two men. One is a BBC radio announcer who was once from Manchester and had a different name. His sister, a former street prostitute who now works as a housekeeper for the aging speech therapist who helps the opera signer adoptive mother with her stutter that was a product of the war, goes on a radio program to talk about her experiences. She sees him and begins stalking him. She says he raped her. He says she wanted it and that their father then raped him in retaliation. He is hit by a train and killed -- murder, accident or suicide?
There is a Scotland Yard detctive investigating. His wife is leaving him so he asks all his female coworkers to go to the dance classes he booked with him. They turn him down; it wouldn't be appropriate. Later they apologize for being brusque. Eventually he finds the sister of the dead BBC guy; the speech therapist has died and she's gone back to selling herself. Mr. Scotland Yard brings her back for trial, but not before they talk for a long time. He just needs someone to talk to.
Eventually the adoptive boy finds out the truth about his mother. That she was sold into prostitution by her uncle. That she escaped with the help of a feminist lesbian filmmaker. That his adoptive mother adopted him because the filmmaker felt her career meant she couldn't raise a child, that there is an implication that the opera singer got the woman to agree to let her adopt him by donating to her films.
Okay, that leaves a lot out, but that should be enough for the following rant to make sense (and you know I'm pissed when I number my points):
1. Women essentially had only two roles in this play: mothers and whores
2. Every time prostitution was talked about or displayed on stage it was done so in a way that was both inaccurate and designed to titillate.
3. At one point we see street prostitutes approach a car to do business. The blocking and music are designed to make their progress towards the car seem a threatening advance. Bullshit.
4. One large chunk of the play is an actual BBC interview featuring a female street prostitute and a male escort who says he services only female clients and only fucks them if he wants to. Okay, the interview is real, but the idea that this male perspective is a useful, valid or even true counterpoint to the experience of the female street prostitute is bullshit. Male prostitutes mostly serve male clients. Period. Anything else is a romanticizing lie, and I just watched nine fucking hours of theater built around that lie.
5. Women pay for the opportunity to by mothers by sacrificing their careers. Women in the play who continue to have careers surrender babies. Everything is buying and selling and really offensive absolutes.
6. There is repeated eroticization of mother figures by sons -- people date people repeatedly because they remind them of their mothers. Women are constantly reassuring and rocking men who are entitled, incompetent philanders in their arms, because it is apparently the job of women to salve the wounds of men.
7. Rape is enacted on stage in a way that is meant to be titillating. Repeatedly. A naked male torso has a video camera trained on it. The man punches his nipples, sticks his hands down his pants -- this is then projected onto the leotard-clad body of the dead prostitute mother. So men raping women sold into prostitution are men committing self harm? I need to feel bad for the men here because of their desire for drugged and raped 15-year-olds? This whole play is about rape and prostitution so that we can feel bad for the men?
8. At the end of the play the gay woman rescues the dead mother prostitute and then the adoptive mother of the boy picks up this actress in her arms like a baby, and then passes this dead mother figure to the boy, who then also cradles her in his arms and then they finish in a tableau like the Pieta that makes the dead prostitute mother Jesus. Really? We're going to just hand the kidnapped, drugged and raped prostitute character around and say that this is good, she's been saved and has sacrificed nobly for the men of this narrative and that's going to make us feel good about these things?
I'm really not doing this justice, but holy shit, the offensive messages of this clusterfuck included the idea that only "mentally ill people can be artists," (also that "all mentally ill people are artists") and that we should feel sympathy and compassion for men in privileged positions (doctors, executives) when the women that are subordinate to them rebuff their advances. The play lied repeatedly about the realities of sex work and glamorized and eroticized it even at its most brutal levels. It repeatedly informed us that male pain was more important than female pain, that women were designed to endure and sacrifice and that when rape happens to men it's more important than rape that happens to women.
And then, at the end, instead of saying "wow, the whole planet is fucked up no matter who you are" or saying "ugh, this is horrible how we treat people and the double standards" it told us this was all a beautiful noble thing and we must love women for their great sacrifices on the altar of ... something.
I have never so wanted to punch a play in the face.
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Do you mean, "in her arms"? I got confused early on and never really got unconfused ... this is probably a good indicator of what the play is like.
What does the title refer to? Are women just lipsynching to the words men give them?
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The play seeks to be about the difference between voice, speech and communication (the woman with the brain tumor can't make words for a chunk of time, as an example and the film that the boy makes ivolves actors from four countries who have a long dinner in which Spanish, English, German and French is spoken and no one can understand anyone).
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Y'all deserve a medal or something for sitting through this.
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No wonder it had time to offend so thoroughly.
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I want to punch this in the face as well. Point no. 7 made my jaw drop.
Fucking hell.
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I thought a number of your thoughts on Lipsynch also applied to the first season of Heroes -- as you say, it's a reflection of a rape culture.
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I'm offended already.
Homeslice needs an editor, STAT. And a cluebyfour.
N.
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*boggles at the entire notion of a play that's that long*
And then for it to have epic fail like that... >.
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The 'not-everyone-sees-American-Beauty-as-being-about-the-girl' bit is interesting; I'll admit I've had the reverse experience (seeing shows/movies as being about the white people when others have pointed out a really different interpretation/experience centered on the other characters.)
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Right. Topping the list of things not to suggest to the local theatre community...
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So, did the adoptive mother opera singer give up her career to raise the boy?
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That's how I felt when I saw "Spring Awakening" a few months ago.
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I'm so sorry you blew a day for that (and that I managed to miss you while I was here because I wasn't feeling well).
Oleanna isn't a perfect play, but it was a whole lot better than that (we saw it on Saturday), and I think that people who find Carol's character deranged (as some have said) really don't understand the issue and are more a part of rape culture than they realize.
In Oleanna, John tries to convince Carol that his pain is more inportant than her pain, and she doesn't buy it. Nor should she.