Lypsinka: The Boxed Set

Lypsinka! The Boxed Set: 'Pity me?! Pity Sara!!'

You know how in The Exorcist movie the teenage girl played by Linda Blair is possessed and when she talks, Mercedes McCambridge's voice comes out of her mouth? That's exactly what it's like with Lypsinka in her solo show Lypsinka! The Boxed Set.

Well, Lypsinka doesn't have the complexion issues that Blair's poor Regan did -- you know, those pesky boils erupting all over her puffy, cement-colored face. (Lypsinka's skin is the shade of fresh cream and silken from stem to sternum.) And her hair isn't that ratted, matted mess of grocery-bag brown. (Try locks of lustrous henna that sweep off one side of her head like a sassy ocean wave.) Of course, she's dressed more glamorously. (No shapeless old shift but a chic, sequin-spangled sleeveless top and succession of stylish skirts designed by Bryant Hoven.) And Lypsinka certainly doesn't spend her time baiting you with lines about your mother's recreational activities in the netherworld. (She's too busy performing novelty numbers from the Cabaret Acts That Time Forgot and telling you how much she loves show business and singing for all the "little people.")

But when you watch Lypsinka, say, belting a glitzy version of "I've Got to Be Me" or rattling off one of Norma Desmond's screeds from Sunset Blvd., there is that same weird sense that you get in The Exorcist of looking at someone speak and knowing that the voice you're hearing isn't coming from that person, yet you're still accepting the connection between it and the "speaker." You hear this vintage Vegas stage patter or histrionic blast from some creaky Hollywood sudser and you get what it is, you may even recognize the bit or the voice delivering it -- in a mere 60 minutes, Lypsinka channels Joan Crawford, Phyllis Diller, Bette Davis, Ethel Merman, everyone from Natalie Wood in Gypsy to Agnes Moorehead in Bewitched to Faye Dunaway in Chinatown -- but the power of the moment, the conviction of the performer within the world she is creating, vaults you beyond your awareness of the recording of someone else to a place where what's being pretended is also real. Lypsinka is speaking, just as Regan is growling the voice of Satan.

And like Regan, Lypsinka is possessed. As The Boxed Set reels frenetically from song to show-biz anecdote to soap dialogue and back, like Judy Garland on a speed jag, Lypsinka herself periodically appears besieged by the ghosts of the dames and divas whose voices she channels. She'll pause, a look of Fifties fright-show fear creeping over her face, then bark in Ethel Merman's voice, "Who am I? What am I doing here?" Her hands, those expressive, exquisitely manicured hands that glide and turn so delicately at her bidding, turn on her, stealing toward her slender throat with mayhem on their crimson-nailed minds. There's something inside Lypsinka, something making her lose control. As the spotlight tightens malevolently around her face, as she writhes in a web of blood-red light, her mouth frozen in a Hitchcockian scream, Lypsinka joins her sisters in spirit, all the tormented heroines from the worlds of Douglas Sirk and Jackie Susann, the Neely O'Haras and Mama Roses, the women of talent, beauty, or brains betrayed by the booze, the biz, their burning hidden secrets, or whatever other demon spirit has invaded them.

Yes, Lypsinka is possessed, but unlike a certain Georgetown teen whose penchant for projectile vomiting terrifies, her possession inspires laughter. Lypsinka! The Boxed Set is a hoot, a joyride through a neighborhood of tacky mansions haunted by grande dames of outsized egos and overwrought emotions. John Eppserson, Lypsinka's alter ego (or pathetic personal maid, if you ask her), has created a soundtrack that's astonishing in its obscurity and complexity. You wonder where on earth he uncovered these excerpts from long-lost nightclub acts or talk-show interviews in which a rhinestone diva rambles foggily through a song intro or delivers a tipsy sermon on the lack of class at today's Oscar ceremonies. And the way he strings them together can take your breath away, as with the hysterical sequences in which Lypsinka answers one ringing phone after another, lifting the phantom receiver just long enough to roar some hoary line from a midnight movie -- "Pity me?! Pity Sara!!" -- before going to the next. The lines are howlers by themselves, but Epperson threads them together to play off each other and build to crescendos of hilariously melodramatic thunder.

Of course, the effect wouldn't be half as riotous without the ultra-crisp embodiment of the lines' turgid emotion in the person of Lipsynka. She amplifies the comedy in them with her arched eyebrows, her squinty-eyed glares, her clenched teeth, the swing of her hips, the pout of her lips, her turns, her stops, her gasps. She knows every expression and gesture for the Wronged Wife, the Suffering Mother, the Embittered Has-Been, the Sodden Star, the Unrepentant Tramp, and every other staple of the modern melodrama, and she executes them with an uncanny precision. When she does Norma Desmond, her head tilts back, her eyes roll down, the corners of her mouth spread wide and down, and her hands fly up over her head where they hang like malignant mistletoe; she's the picture of Gloria Swanson as the demented star. It's like there is an architecture for this genre's hyperbolic emotionalism, and she is the master builder, reconstructing every aspect of it for us with meticulous care.

So absorbing is all this that you may forget about Jim Boutin's snappy set, a wide white pop art stage which glows every color of the electric spectrum -- cherry soda red, margarita mix green, Dreamsicle orange -- under Mark T. Simpson's inspired lighting. That would be unfortunate, but it would be understandable. After all, how often do you see a woman possessed?