Kushner has a penchant for taking on big projects and important themes, starting with his most famous work, “Angels in America,” a six-hour, two-part play about AIDS that received the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. For further evidence of his ambition, as well as a somewhat outrageous sense of humor, consider the title of his most recent major play: “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures.”

Yet for all Kushner’s big involvements, he recently took time to come up with just the right new three-syllable word to replace another word that he decided was a little too mundane. It was while in the midst of final rehearsals in Cooperstown, where the Glimmerglass Festival is producing the world premiere of “A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck.” The new one-act opera by composer Jeanine Tesori, to an original libretto by Kushner, debuts tonight (7/21) and runs for five more performances through Aug. 22.

“When writing in verse forms, there are various strictures that you have to obey and a somewhat mathematical precision in searching for a word that will fit,” explains Kushner. “Writing lyrics, instead of writing language that’s supposed to approximate how people speak spontaneously, forces you in a slightly different relationship to language. It knocks the dust off the machinery a little bit.”

Creating “Blizzard” is certainly not Kushner’s first time immersed in music. His parents were professional musicians, and he has already collaborated extensively with composer Tesori. Their through-composed musical “Caroline, or Change” played on Broadway for 136 performances in 2004 and received six Tony Award nominations. The team also has an outstanding commission from the Metropolitan Opera.

“I can’t write or read music, but I love it, and go the opera all the time, though I’m sort of up and down about musical theatre,” says Kushner. “I love the chance at having this intimate connection to singing and to music.”

Asked if there’s a difference between writing for an opera versus a musical, Kushner turns to the diverging nature of the genres and their practitioners.

”I’m not entirely sure of the difference between a musical or opera, but when you go into an opera company with people trained to sing operatically, the expectation is different,” he says. ” ‘Caroline, or Change’ was commissioned for the San Francisco Opera with Bobby McFerrin, but he decided he didn’t want to write an opera. Director George Wolfe was happy about that, because he wanted to work with musical theater performers, not opera singers. There are certain things that musical theatre people know how to do that opera people don’t and vice versa.”

Similar to slotting in words to fit a musical line, Kushner and Tesori were given a very specific task when commissioned last year by Glimmerglass and Francesca Zambello, the company head who is staging the new work. Zambello already had in mind to produce “Later The Same Evening,” by John Musto and Mark Campell, a one-act that deals with the life of painter Edward Hopper. As a companion piece, Zambello requested another one-act about the life of an American artist. Kushner immediately thought of playwright Eugene O’Neill.

“I’m an O’Neill fanatic and have been working on a screenplay about his life for the past 13 years,” says Kushner. “If you’re a playwright, you go to O’Neill as the source. There’s really not much in the way of serious American theatre before he came along. He proved it could exist. He’s the father of us all, the first to stake a claim nationally and internationally for American dramatic literature.”

“A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck” depicts a rather infamous incident that occurred late in O’Neill’s life. It’s February 1951 and O’Neill, 63, gets into a heated argument with his wife, Carlotta. Although in failing health, he walks out of their cabin into a snowstorm and is rescued an hour later.

“The fight that he and Carlotta had almost ended their marriage, but in a sense he never recovered from it,” explains Kushner. “After an hour in the snow, he went into the hospital and stayed fairly seriously infirmed for the rest of his life.”

“Their relationship is a tortured love story. Most great ones are,” adds Kushner.

Besides the husband and wife roles, the opera includes three singers who portray famous drama critics of the era. They’re evoked through some insults the wife hurls at her husband, the sensitive artist. Dealing with tough reviews is a sore spot Kushner can identify with.

“The relationship between critics and playwrights is infinitely tormented,” says Kushner. “If you know of any artist who has no ax to grind, I’d love to meet them and find their secret.”

Kushner says the new opera is one of the shortest things he’s ever written. Just 20 pages of text, it spills out over some 40 minutes of music. Though the work is completed and ready to debut, Kushner’s enterprise starts to show through again during the final rehearsals in Cooperstown.

“When I was watching it, I had a vision of expanding it,” he says. “I’m very pleased with it and think I’ll try to give it further life. I’d like to write more, add one or two other sections, maybe make it a complete evening.”

As much as I’ve loved that slow and lush music and its popular 1992 recording by Dawn Upshaw, I don’t remember ever checking out the words, which are sung in Polish. But supertitles provided translations during the performance of “Lipsynch,” seen on Sunday October 11 in the Harvey Theater as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music‘s Next Wave Festival.   And the poetry provides a potent prelude to what ensues:

My son, my chosen and beloved

Share your wounds with your mother

Because, dear son, I have always carried you in my heart.

While there’s other vocal music sprinkled throughout the nine-hour show, only one character does, almost, lipsynch.  That’s Sarah who we see doing some light housework, smoking a cigarette and mouthing along to Burt Bacharach’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” as it plays on the radio.

Sarah’s a sometime prostitute and also the housekeeper for an elderly, wheelchair-bound speech therapist, who was a mentor and mother figure to Ada, who’s an opera singer and soloist in the Gorecki and who adopts Jeremy, who’s own mother dies on an airplane in the opening scene, while he was just an infant.  After a youthful stint leading a satanic rock band, Jeremy becomes a filmmaker, and writes a script based on what he knows about his birth mother. He researched her heritage in Nicaragua, but didn’t learn the truth about how she got to Germany only to die in a plane headed to Canada until the audience also finds out, at the play’s end.

These relationships, and many others besides, actually make plenty of sense and become quite affecting as they are revealed throughout the daylong journey.

Spending so much time in the theater — the nine hours includes four intermissions plus a 45-minute dinner break — fostered a sense of community in the audience.  I shared supper with a lively bunch sitting near by, including an acting student in her early 20s who’d only been in the city for two weeks.

Manhattanites probably still complain about having to travel all the way out to Brooklyn in order to take in BAM’s unique offerings. But I rose early and took Amtrak down from Albany to see “Lipsynch.”  Not only did I buy a train ticket, I bought my seat for the show, too. That’s not something I’m accustomed to doing. One of the few fringe benefits of being a perpetually struggling freelance writer is free tickets.  BAM’s publicity office pleaded limited availability of press tickets, but were good enough to comp me for Philip Glass’ latest opera “Kepler,” which I’ll return for in November.  (That same week I’ll also catch Lepage’s staging of Berlioz “Damnation of Faust” at The Met.)

I had little doubt that Lepage would be worth the time, effort and money.  My familiarity with him grew out of my relationship to BAM.

After beginning my arts career with a season-long internship working for Philip Bither in the Next  Wave office, I was a loyal subscriber for all of my 13 years living in the city before moving upstate in 2000. I focused my ticket buying on the music and dance offerings but generally trusted Joe Melillo and Harvey Lichenstein’s tastes. And so I took a chance on Lepage’s “Seven Streams of the River Ota” in 1996.  Also an eight- to nine-hour immersion, “Ota” weaved together another bundle of stories involving nothing less than the Holocaust, Hiroshima and AIDS.  I find it difficult to even put all three of those tragedies into one sentence, but Lepage’s show was masterful and transcendent, very human and often hilarious.  It’s not an exaggeration to say it was one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen.

“Lipsynch” doesn’t quiet raise to that level, but it doesn’t shoot as high either. Instead of placing characters in epic catastrophes, they face health issues like schizophrenia and brain tumors, or are trapped in sex slavery and incest. Plus there’s just plenty of good old fashioned family alienation.

Lepage’s trademarks as a director are in the use of audio and visual technology and the reliance on large sets made of multi-panel units.  In “Lipsynch” there’s plenty of fancy live video and audio technology new and old, including cassettes and open reel tape decks.   A large crew wheels in and out all manner of complicated but multi-functional sets.

But in a departure from Lepage’s visual focus, “Lipsyche” is, above all, about sounds and voices.  The whole idea for the piece, which Lepage wrote in collaboration with the actors of his Toronto-based company known as ExMachina, came to him while riding in an airplane. An operatic soprano was warming up in first class at the same time a baby was crying in coach.  Both of those show up in the first scene and are followed by:

• a surgeon illustrating the parts of a brain that affect speech
• voice lessons and the unexpected intimacy they often bring about between teacher and student
• speech therapy
• overdubbing spoken dialogue for a film
• lip-reading
• multi-track recording of vocal music with no texts (one track sounded like a percussion line, two and three tracks together like Steve Reich, and the final four-track like a kind of Medieval take on Meredith Monk)
• choir practice
• jazz scatting
• electronic transformation of a female voice into the male register (a la Laurie Anderson)
• the emotional effect of remembering a deceased parent’s voice
• multiple overlapping conversations in a crowded restaurant
• voices raised in an argument (though the actors are unseen)
• the pervasive, wallpaper characteristics of radio news, as it drones on and on
• poetry recitation
• the necessity of changing one’s voice to change one’s identity.
• recording of audio books
• actors creating a laugh track
• the uncanny ability to identify a person’s age, body type and province by listening to a voice
• the voices heard in one’s head, sometimes as a symptom of mental illness.
• voice mail
• and, of course, cell phones with and without hands free devices.

Many of these drive the plot, while the presence of certain things, especially the brain surgery, seemed a little obvious.

There were only nine actors in the show and each played multiple parts. At least half of “Lipsynch” was performed in languages other than English, including French, Spanish, German and Italian.  Frequently the supertitles dropped away with little effect, since the gist of things was clear enough.  Who needs to know every invective hurled during an argument.

Also present was another trademark of Lepage’s own creations (as opposed to his increasing work in opera) and it’s something that I relish:  silence.  What a rarity in the theater!  Several pivotal scenes were conducted with no dialogue, just some random street noise or the sound of news commentators on talk radio.

In a brilliant and luxurious device, one scene of at least 10 minutes in length was performed twice, back to back.  It takes place inside a small Toronto bookstore on a snowy evening.  First, we watch from the street, looking in through the dirty windows at Michelle, a middle aged woman who’s wrestled with mental illness.  She glimpses out on the chilly sidewalk a priest dressed in vestments and a little girl in play clothes. It’s obvious that they exist only in her mind. All we hear are traffic noises.  But then time jumps backward and we’re inside the warmth of the shop and listen as Michelle patiently assists the browsers and shows an impressive knowledge of literature and poetry.  In the scene’s final action, she hands a large book to a young man who departs without paying.  On first viewing, it seems she’s carelessly giving away the stock. But on second encounter, we hear that it’s a loan to a struggling student burdened with homework.

There were many other wonderful moments in “Lipsych,” lots of funny lines and a wrenching denouement that most of us figured out by the time the last intermission rolled around.

After all those voices, disembodied and incarnate, and all that modern technology, the marathon ends as it began with some of the Gorecki symphony. The singer, Rebecca Blankenship who played Ada, appears much as she did at the beginning. But now, she’s not just a singer, but she’s one more voice that’s not yet been included in the play — that of the earth itself.

Where has he gone

My dearest son?

Perhaps during the uprising

The cruel enemy killed him…

He lies in his grave

and I know not where

Though I keep asking people

Everywhere.