The La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club has never been a place for tidy narratives. For nearly six decades, the downtown institution has sheltered work that privileges sensation over exposition, collective vision over individual star turns. Its latest production, Voices Carry, arrives squarely in that tradition: a devised, multimedia ensemble piece that asks whether coherence itself is a luxury we can still afford. The answer, at least on the night I attended, was complicated.
Voices Carry seems to be operating in the tradition of ensemble-built work, where narrative continuity is deliberately subordinated to thematic resonance and sensory impact. Directed by Rachel Chavkin—whose previous La MaMa collaborations established her as a singular architect of theatrical space—the production treats disjunction not as a flaw but as a formal strategy. The question is whether that strategy earns its effects, or merely disguises a lack of rigor.
Design That Dismantles the Room
Where Voices Carry succeeds most fully is in its manipulation of environment. Set designer Mimi Lien has constructed a space that appears to be in constant negotiation with the performers: a skeletal framework of scaffolding and translucent panels that flickers between industrial ruin and domestic refuge. In one early sequence, the structure contracts to suggest a cramped apartment; minutes later, panels slide away to reveal a cavernous void, as if the floor itself had been pulled out from under the characters. It is architecture as emotional weather.
Sound designer Ryan Hearn compounds this instability. His score places the audience inside the show's acoustic unrest: subway rumble bleeds into electronic drone, which unexpectedly resolves into a cappella harmony, so that we're never permitted to settle into one sonic world. At a pivotal moment near the end of the first act, all sound drops out except for the amplified breathing of a single performer—an effect so intimate it felt less like theatrical technique than like someone had exhaled directly into your ear.
The Limits of Deliberate Fragmentation
Yet formal daring cannot fully excuse the production's narrative drift. Voices Carry follows a loose constellation of individuals navigating what appears to be a collapsing social order—there are hints of climate catastrophe, state surveillance, and mass displacement—but the connections among them remain frustratingly opaque. This would matter less if the individual threads were compelling on their own terms; too often, they dissolve into atmospheric gesture.
The characters, likewise, register less as specific people than as carriers of theme. One figure seems to embody grief, another resistance, another the seduction of complicity, but these identities are asserted rather than dramatized. In experimental work, cipher-like characters can function as productive blanks, inviting audience projection. Here, they too frequently feel simply under-imagined.
Performers Who Refuse to Be Reduced
Against this uneven terrain, a handful of performers manage to carve out something urgently human. Emily Davis, in what reads on paper as a minor role, delivers a late monologue about displacement while pacing the perimeter of Lien's collapsing cityscape; her voice barely rises above a whisper, yet she holds the entire room in suspension. It is the rare moment when the production's scale and its intimacy achieve equilibrium.
Akilah Harper accomplishes something equally striking through pure physicality. In a passage that seems to address surveillance, she transforms abstract concept into bodily argument—her limbs fighting against a projected grid of light that tracks her across the stage, her movements growing more frantic as the grid tightens its geometry. When the light finally swallows her whole, the image lingers with a force the surrounding scenes rarely match.
Verdict
Voices Carry is not a failed experiment, but it is an incomplete one. Its creators have built a formidable apparatus for disorientation without always filling it with sufficient purpose. The production's best moments suggest what might have been achieved had its fragments been drawn into sharper tension with one another. As it stands, the show offers ample reward for viewers who can surrender to its sensory logic—but those seeking even the loosest narrative architecture may find themselves adrift.
Rating: 3/5 stars
Recommendation: Go if you trust La MaMa's ethos and respond to work that prioritizes image and sound over plot. Approach with caution if you need characters whose names you will remember, or a world whose rules you can map.
