Dressed Up in Your Skin and Bones
By Jennifer Cayer
The Truth: A Tragedy
By Cynthia Hopkins
Soho Rep
46 Walker St.
(closed)
In a post-show discussion, Cynthia Hopkins, writer,
composer, and performer of The Truth: A Tragedy recalled this
conversation with her father:
John Goodwin Hopkins: Am I
playing myself in the piece?
Cynthia Hopkins: I'm pretending to be you. Is that
OK?
John Goodwin Hopkins: If anyone's going to do it
who's not me, you'd be the next most qualified.
["Ancient Tragedy vs.
Modern Tragedy" FEED 5, May 25, 2010]
The wit and weight of parental legacy punctuates
Hopkins's one-woman reckoning in music, dance, and words with the imminent,
yet slow loss of her father to Parkinson's disease. While John resides
in a nursing home in Massachusetts, Hopkins tells his jokes, dances
the jig falsely promised to him after brain surgery, and performs numbers
both from and inspired by his original musical, Onions! She
rejects her brother's suggestion to write a big commercial musical and
leave the family off-stage, instead offering a non-narrative collection
of twenty-four scenes that attest to a process at once idiosyncratic
and somehow familiar. It is a multi-media cabaret, as much about one
woman's oddball father as it is about the problems of prolonged aging
in America.
In 2009, Beijing-based artist Song Dong installed
the entire contents of his mother's home into the Museum of Modern Art,
in an art piece called Waste Not. Hopkins's performance piece
is similarly accompanied by a small museum of her father's things. These
range from the precious and revealing pages of his unpublished memoir
to the banal objects collected over a lifetime. In this cabinet of curiosities
accumulated pencils become a Calder-esque mobile and a medicine cabinet
becomes a diorama of ailments. Viewers can pull a cord to light old
lanterns encased on the wall or even read whole pages from her father's
musical. The fact that the lanterns are not actually lit, but illuminated
by bulbs hidden below them is one of the many playful and participatory
aspects of the small collection. A sentimental Duchamp, Hopkins elevates
junk into art -- a daughter's disdain into reverent acceptance -- and
gives her father the audience he always wanted.
The project began six years ago as a nascent
documentary film that was never made, Helping my Father Move.
It was Hopkins's way of coping with moving her father into assisted
living, and his willful "anti-organization" where heirlooms, used Q-tips,
and old eyeglasses comingle. This material ultimately found expression
in the theater where Hopkins literally moves in the manner of her father.
This live embodiment of her father poignantly resonates with the particularity
of Parkinson's deep neurological assault. The erosion of motor and linguistic
control and sundering of the body's understanding of itself in space
connect to the art of the theater. Like Agnes Varda's memoir in and
of film, The Beaches of Agnes (2009), Hopkins seems invested
in what the medium of theater can do to the re-enactment of her father
and the re-telling of her stories. In the theater bodily expressions
and movements are played with, rehearsed, mastered, and repeated for
a live other. Part of Hopkins's homage here is physical. She enacts
both her father's dyskinesia via fitful and labored dances and his verbal
agility as a lifelong comedian of one-liners. Her father -- a packrat,
schoolteacher, sometime actor, and wannabe sea captain -- is re-animated
through the lens of her performing body. We see him through her as a
being momentarily freed from illness.
Hopkins situates this piece on a map with other
life performers including Spalding Gray, Miranda July, and Anna Deavere
Smith. In the opening moment of the show, an empty portrait frame emerges
from behind the curtain. Hopkins then appears in clownish whiteface
wearing a skirt made out of her father's ties and oversized men's shoes.
The "truth" of her father that the show's title promises is missing,
out of the frame, and in excess. The stage, like her over-costumed body,
becomes its own disorderly exhibit, as it is systematically covered
with playing cards, love letters, a carrot, socks, shoes, pills, records,
a walker, and later a large fleshy dildo that becomes the punctum of
the visual mess. (While reading her father's unpublished memoir, Hopkins
learned of his homosexuality.)
The performance and the museum work in tandem,
and in tension. While the museum exhibit at first glance frames the
mundane, the performance fills the portrait frame to the brim. The detritus
of a life is at first a nuisance, something to pack up and away as the
space of a life shrinks from home to nursing home. The objects get in
the way of life's forward march. The performance, however, enacts a
kind of conversion experience on the stuff itself, the objects become
re-charged with the specificity of her stories. Like Plymouth Rock,
the dullest of landmarks, they become heroic relics; the act of rescue
from obscurity charms them. At the same time they become recognizable
as totems for the viewer's own privately curated drawers, closets, and
basements. Hopkins's ludic and loving attentions show how this stuff
is at once everyday and extraordinary, deeply personal and universal.
Hopkins's triumph in performance is the subtle
way that she invites the audience into what could be the claustrophobic,
opaque, all too specific space of another's pain. Film is used to this
end with unexpected and novel effects. Documentary footage of John oddly
evokes that grainy genre of family memories, and he becomes a momentary
shell for the elders we may know and the ones we might become. In this
most visually accurate of representations, he seems most distant. Like
the early French photographer Felix Nadar's claim that a caricature
is better able to capture the essence of someone than a photograph,
Hopkins's embodiments seem to capture him, while the museum objects
and documents serve to capture the audience. Scenes dedicated to "Medical
Professionals" also offer familiar points of entry by depicting miscommunications
with doctors and the callousness of the health care system. At one point,
the screen flashes like a strobe light and a muffled voice-over commands
"keep eyes open." The audience is put in John's, or in any patient's,
place and can feel the impossibility of following simple directions
to move our bodies. Hopkins represents the challenges of caretaking
and gently replicates the experience of being in a body that refuses
to obey, to perform.
The recorded excerpts from an exercise tape
that accompany the first moments of the show also foreground the challenges
of performance for Hopkins. The voice-over invites basic bodily movement
with an ease that mocks the audience's knowledge of John's physical
state. Hopkins's dancing links her mobility to her father's immobility.
Later, during one of her songs, Hopkins also battles with a piano that
keeps snapping shut on her fingers. A conveniently placed set of large
plastic hands come to the rescue and allow "her" to finish
the song. With the hands in place, the music shifts from Hopkins's live
performance to the recorded. Throughout The Truth, Hopkins
sings in a solo voice accompanied by piano or accordion without her
usual band, Gloria Deluxe. And although The Truth is distinctly
less fantastical than her Accidental Trilogy (2005, 2007, 2009),
the prosthetics remind us that sometimes the fake and the made-up are
still needed to sing the song, to approximate the truth.
The Truth ranges from funny to distressing;
likewise, her voice, which is reminiscent of Natalie Merchant, has a
rapid ability to swing from sweet to strident. A few cabinets are staged
as over-the-top comedy routines; Hopkins's voice is a little bit too
loud and a garish laugh track seems to follow statements lifted from
her dad, such as, "lately I've been drifting into oncoming traffic."
Although the content is often not funny, the delivery is. In a cabinet
entitled "The Theater" Hopkins connects this phenomenon of making humor
from losing control with her own personal reckoning with her father
and his illness. She concludes that you can either consider him crazy
or comic, and in turn you can either go insane trying to deal with it,
or turn it into comedy, which she does. Ultimately, The Truth
is a testament to her own spiritual transformations, from frustration
to fascination with his junk and from resentment to forgiveness.
In the penultimate moment of the piece, Hopkins
slowly exits the stage while reciting a litany of death clichés in her
father's voice -- "Well, I'm finally ready to kick the bucket… meet
my maker…give up the ghost…dance the last dance." These repeated words
do not pronounce John dead. They humorously render the multiple near-deaths
that precede the last breath in what can be a protracted process of
dying. In the show, they also evoke the reiterability of a life as re-arranged
and seen anew. If someone can almost die, again and again, perhaps they
can also live again and again. Hopkins insists on this in scene after
scene dedicated to his unique and singular life. She is able to survive
her father's death by assembling an ephemeral memorial.
In one particularly tender moment, Hopkins sings,
"Oh father, please listen, you're breathing, you're living/ And your
teaching is also living/ It doesn't matter if you wrote it down." Hopkins's
saving of things is her own theatrical answer to an ethical dilemma
facing those caring for patients who desire to die. Or, in her father's
words, a patient whose "exit keeps getting blocked." What is one's responsibility
to a loved one who wants to die? How is it that we keep them safe? And
what is safety in this condition between pain and death? Hopkins keeps
him safe in her saving. And she dances and sings in the debris of his
utter and extravagant difference, in what amounts to an act of the deepest
and most difficult form of loving -- loving what you might not like,
what you know will never change, and what will surely be gone too soon.
Near the end of her filmic self-portrait, Agnes
Varda says of her children and grandchildren: "Together, they're the
sum of my happiness. But I don't know if I know them. I just go toward
them." Hopkins, too, moves toward and into images and imaginings of
her father, while he continues to move ever away.
Although he has yet to, and probably will not
be able to travel to see the piece, here is John Goodwin Hopkins's own
take on it:
Cynthia Hopkins: How do you
feel about this show that I'm making that's in homage to you. Are
you OK with it?
John Goodwin Hopkins: Yes. I think it will be overstated
on the virtuous side and, perhaps a little bit, understated on the
realistic side.
[from "One
Point Victory" a video by Cynthia Hopkins and director DJ Mendel]
I don't think I could put it any better than
that.