No Place To Go

Concert-Play-Performance
by Ethan Lipton

With Ethan Lipton (vocals), Vito Dieterle (saxophone), Eben Levy (electric guitar), Ian Riggs (bass/acoustic guitar)

This really wonderful and entertaining piece is sort of like a labor oratorio, a jazz lament, or Death of a Salesman put into blues riffs. It is inventive, quite out of the ordinary and full of fabulous touches.

Ethan Lipton is the main vocal man in this quartet, but the music is so generally excellent that one has to commend the whole group for its top notch realization of these offbeat and sometimes hilarious songs.

Lipton is something like a middle-aged cross between Leonard Cohen, Jacques Brel and Mick Jagger, full of longing and humor, but energetic, driving, passionate and full of piss and vinegar.

The basic story that holds the evening together is the account of losing a long-held job. Whether or not this is Lipton’s actual story is immaterial; it is told so vividly and personally it might as well be.

One vivid, funny line follows the next in Lipton’s rap. The protagonist has worked in the “information refinement” department, different, as he notes, from the “fact” department. He is a permanent part-time employee without benefits, but, as he wails happily at the outset “I got a place to go in the morning.” Though a part-time playwright and “old-timey singer-songwriter,” he still loves his information refinement job.

But when the company decides to relocate far away (to “Mars” as he puts it), the protagonist is thrown into the dilemma of having to decide whether to move or to stay. And, if he were to move, would the company give him a full-time job with benefits? Would they want him that much?

The trials and anxieties come out in a wild cry “when it was good with you there was no greater good under the sun” punctuated with aching Tevye-like oy,oy,oy‘s echoed beautifully by Vito Deiterle’s saxophone, making a twisting pair of penetrating and authentic wails.

When he decides that he can’t move, for an as yet unexplained reason, he is forced to dig up a resume, something that he remembers having created on an Atari personal computer and stored somewhere on a floppy disk – quietly hilarious. A Shit Storm Is Coming, with a driving beat, confirms I should be running in excellent offbeats.

And then the possibilities for survival begin to arise. When We Move In With My Aging Middle Class Parents, done in hard rockabilly style, alone knocks that option out of the ring.

Through the piece, there is a continuing joke by the rest of the band suggesting subtly that maybe they are a good part of the protagonist deciding not to go to Mars with the company. Yet, it does not rapidly dawn on Lipton’s protagonist that his life with the band, and as playwright-singer-songwriter, might actually be what is holding him. As the realization grows out of the gag, however, the sweetness of the collaboration we have all been watching comes clearly into relief and begins to gel.

The music in this show is so good, the energy so high, the feelings so seemingly sincere, the rap so funny, the issue so immediate and prevalent, and it is all told so pointedly and sung so plaintively by a middle-aged guy who really rocks out, that the effect is powerful, sincere, and also lots of fun.

– BADMan