VIP Lounge: Wendy Lippe on Iceland, 9

If you could travel anywhere right now, where would you go? Iceland. It’s January and the perfect time to see the Northern Lights. And now that I’ve discovered this amazing glass house surrounded by the Northern Lights on Airbnb, it’s definitely time to go.
Brookline resident Wendy Lippe is a clinical psychologist with a private practice and a clinical assistant professorship at Boston University. She is also a theater professional who is a member of the Actors’ Equity Association. In 2010, she combined the two pursuits and founded The Psych Drama Company ( www.thepsychdramacompany.com ). “I wanted to reach people and connect with audiences in as meaningful a way as possible,” she said in a recent phone call. “We’ve experimented with many ways of doing that, having produced everything from Shakespeare to works from the American greats, like Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams.” The nonprofit theater company’s latest production, Sarah Ruhl’s “Stage Kiss” is, Lippe said, a “departure” from what the company has done in the past. “We were going to do Eugene O’Neill’s ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night,’ but the world right now is so heavy and dark, that we decided it was time for a comedy with dramatic elements that warm the heart,” she said, referring to “Stage Kiss” as Ruhl’s “love letter to actors that takes the psychology of the ‘showmance’ and elevates it tenfold.” The immersive production (“We break the fourth wall, so the audience has the option of getting involved in the show,” she said), directed by Second City alum and Boston University graduate Rani O’Brien, is at the Boston Center for the Arts Plaza Blackbox Theatre Feb. 13-23. It’s no coincidence that “Stage Kiss” is opening on the eve of Valentine’s Day, said Lippe, the company’s producing artistic director — who is also a cast member in the latest production. “It asks important questions about the nature of love and loving, and it helps us to be curious about the love relationships we choose and why we choose them; that we make different choices for love relationships at different stages in our lives,” she said. “As a clinical psychologist, I am very invested in our society becoming less judgmental and critical and more curious and compassionate. I think that this particular play holds the potential of helping us move away from defensive and simplistic categorization of love relationships, such as ‘this is a toxic relationship,’ ‘this is my soulmate’ … these are really empty, vague terms and they are quite binary, whereas human love relationships are so layered and complicated and filled with dialectical tensions.” We caught up the Great Neck, N.Y., native to talk about all things travel.
Wendy Lippe (in 2022) outside of an overwater bungalow in Jamaica.
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Do you prefer booking trips through a travel agent or on your own? For faraway exotic destinations, I always use a travel agent. For European travel, that’s all me.
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Thoughts on an “unplugged” vacation? Overwater bungalows anywhere in the world. You can quite literally unplug from your laptop or cellphone and roll from your desk or bed into the ocean in two seconds. My vacations always involve some amount of work, so this is ideal.
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What has been your worst vacation experience? Flying home from Italy with my mother on 9/11. We were halfway home when we learned the airplane was headed back to Rome. We couldn’t get back into the US for another two weeks.
What is your favorite childhood travel memory? Summer trips to the Jersey Shore with my family to visit my grandparents. We always loved going to Brigantine’s Castle, the live haunted house.
Do you vacation to relax, to learn, or for the adventure of it all? All of the above. Different vacations meet different needs. The Devil’s Pool at the edge of the precipice of Victoria Falls, the DMZ in South Korea, and Ravello on the Amalfi Coast are all equally wonderful, but in very different ways.
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What book do you plan on bringing with you to read on your next vacation? Two plays: Edward Albee’s “At Home at the Zoo” and Noel Coward’s “Private Lives.”
If you could travel with one famous person/celebrity, who would it be? Patrick Swayze … don’t ask.
What is the best gift to give a traveler? Frequent flyer miles.
What is your go-to snack for a flight or a road trip? Some chocolate and some protein.
What is the coolest souvenir you’ve picked up on a vacation? A 5-foot-tall art nouveau sculpture from Prague.
What is your favorite app/website for travel? Tripadvisor.com.
What has travel taught you? Perspective. You have to get out of the box in which you exist in order to actually see the box for what it is — and for what it isn’t. Similarly, travel paradoxically takes us out of ourselves and simultaneously connects us more deeply to ourselves.
What is your best travel tip? Just go. Don’t obsess about it. Life is too short and there is so much to experience in this big, beautiful world.
Juliet Pennington can be reached at writeonjuliet@comcast.net.