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The art of lip sync has become a mass-culture phenomenon in the past decade or so. But long before RuPaul’s Drag Race, Lip Sync Battle and TikTok, there was Lypsinka: the demented alter ego of John Epperson, who raises lip service to a dance form in rigorous and hilarious collages of songs and words, mouthing along to clips drawn from collective camp memory. Nobody does it better, and if you haven’t seen her, you are missing an essential puzzle piece of New York culture of the past 40 years. But here’s your chance to fix that: Lypsinka: Toxic Femininity, a fabulous new short film directed by Chloë Sevigny, is now streaming for free on the New Group’s website through February 16.
Lypsinka was born in the early 1980s, when Epperson went to Christopher Street on Halloween and performed with a boom box for passers-by. Since then, the character—who channels great dames of the 20th-century silver screen and musical stage, in all their poise and poison—has taken its place among the icons of female impersonation in America, starring in multiple solo shows, most recently in 2015. It was during the isolation of the pandemic shutdown that Epperson came up with the idea for the film, which finds Lypsinka in what Epperson calls “an existential limbo.”
“The famous line in [Jean-Paul Sartre’s] No Exit is, ‘Hell is other people,’” said Epperson in an interview at the film’s recent premiere at the Roxy Theatre. “But since we were all alone, I thought: How hell is myself? How does Lypsinka be alone with herself? And since it's film, there could be multiple Lipsinkae.”
A sense of multiplicity has always been at the core of the Lypsinka persona. Lypsinka’s art is both a celebration of and resistance to the pressure of performing womanhood. She always seems at war with herself, mouthing her lines with a combination of commitment and satire; just beneath the mask of glamour lurks a sense of panic waiting to claw its way out. Occasionally one of her own hands will stiffen and rise to choke her, as though possessed by some demonic force. In Toxic Femininity, Lypsinka makes this self-division more explicit than ever.
“There are two primary voices in the film: One is Judy Garland and one is Joan Crawford,” Epperson said. “I think of both of them as being trapped by stardom.” Crawford, who “lives in some kind of Everything Is Fabulous Land,” is the steely public face of fame; she is heard narrating her own 1970 book, My Way of Life. In stark contrast, Garland is represented by the bitter, intensely private spoken-word tapes she recorded for a tell-all memoir she never wrote. (“She's almost speaking the truth,” said Epperson.) The film also finds Lypskina lip-syncing musical numbers by Ethel Merman and Mimi Hines, and—in a meta twist—a comic sendup of gossip queen Louella Parsons by the pioneering 1950s female impersonator T.C. Jones.
The result is very funny but also oddly moving. “When John first sent over the audio edit, I listened on headphones and I started crying,” Sevigny recalled. “I found the material really emotional—this woman, the two sides of herself, that dichotomy: being a star and loving it and hating it, and being a woman and loving and hating it. And all the expectations put on me as a woman and an actress, and aging and the public and critics, all of that. I just thought there was such a weight to it.”
To craft the film’s offbeat, homemade aesthetic, Sevigny drew from the grainy feel of the older videos on Lypsinka’s YouTube channel. “I was like, Lypsinka's captured in this time period. She's of another era. But we don't really have the budget to do that,” Sevigny says. “So I thought: Why don't we keep her trapped in this kind of YouTube amber?” To that end, she connected with cinematographer Jennifer Juniper Stratford, who had worked with Drag Race winner Violet Chachki. “Jennifer was making all these short-form art videos in California out of her own little factory,” Sevigny says. “I tracked her down on Instagram and I was like, Can we collaborate? So she brought her beta cameras all the way across the country to shoot this film for us.”
The New Group, one of Off Broadway’s leading theater companies—its latest production, The Seven Year Disappear, begins previews on February 6, starring Cynthia Nixon and Taylor Trensch—co-produced the film, and is streaming Lypsinka: Toxic Femininity for free through February 16, 2024. You can watch it here.
