Lippy
Opening Night: October 15, 2014
Closing: November 2, 2014
Theater: Abrons Arts Center Henry Street Settlement
Fourteen years ago in Leixlip, Co. Kildare, an aunt and three nieces made an extraordinary decision which seemed to defy explanation. They boarded themselves into their home and entered a suicide pact that lasted 40 days. The mysterious hunger strike is the starting point for a theatrical investigation which is both social and metaphysical. We didn’t know these women. We weren’t there. We have no idea what they said. This is not their story. Playing with narrative form and discarding the whys and wherefores, Lippy was widely regarded as one of the most extraordinary works to come out of Ireland last year, from one of the country’s most exciting new companies, Dead Centre (Souvenir, (S)quark! ).
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October 19, 2014
Oh, for the comfort of a corpse that yields its secrets. That’s the premise and promise behind many a television crime series, in which forensic science quantifies irrational human savagery into rational codes that seem as readable as ABC (or N.C.I.S., or S.V.U.). Nary a scrap of alphabetical reassurance is on offer in Lippy, a very smart, very chilly play out of Ireland centered on four dead bodies that refuse to tell their tales. This production from the Dublin-based Dead Centre company, which runs through Nov. 2 at the Abrons Arts Center, is the antithesis of the classic detective story and its satisfying solutions. The clouds of mystery never part in this multilayered, multiform examination of the 2000 real-life suicide pact of three sisters and their aunt, who appear to have died by voluntary starvation in the house they shared in a small Irish town. If anything, the fog of confusion just keeps thickening, taunting our ultimate lack of insight into the lives of others. Sometimes, of course, there’s a cheap thrill in not knowing the answers to lurid mysteries. That’s why David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (soon to be disinterred for a sequel) was such a titillating anomaly for its first season.
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