Theatricalizing a Familial Archive

Abstract

This paper examines a solo performance, The Truth: A Tragedy (2010), by Cynthia Hopkins. Hopkins (b. 1972), a critically acclaimed experimental theater and music artist based in New York City, authored this performance text, one that blends her autobiographical and familial traumas into an elaborate spoken and sung narrative, so that she can become a semi-fictionalized surrogate of herself and of her father John Hopkins (1932-2011). This paper explores how documentary film scholar Michael Renov’s term, ‘domestic ethnography,’ applies to The Truth: A Tragedy and how her theatrical embodiment of her familial traumas expands an understanding and applicability of that term. The paper also puts Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s scholarship on ethnographic objects in conversation with Hopkins’s corresponding ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ installation of her father’s belongings, which she curated and placed in the lobbies of the theaters where she performed. Using the cabinet of curiosities’ genre as a stylistic framing device allows her to inform viewers about a wide range of information, from something as serious as Parkinson’s disease and its potential treatments and side effects to the joys of sailing a ship (with an interactive station). The playfulness threaded throughout the exhibit allows theatergoers to interact with other various items, such that an energetic exchange between the visitor and the objects increases the object’s vitality. As the curator and performer, she intentionally creates her performance and her museum such that the audience must notice how artificial aspects co-mingle with auto/biographical ones. Hopkins, a theatrical domestic ethnographer, gives her performance the appearance of a documentary by both grounding it in specific and detailed things from real life—archival objects, drawings, verbatim text, and film footage—and theatricalizing these truths with her own embodied representations on-stage and curated, interactive invitations in the installation. This work is highly fictive, yet truthful. The truth of her story emerges from the audience’s negotiation of her creative use of familial objects, images, stories, and songs. Ultimately, she encourages viewers to imagine how they might mine, reconstruct, and reflect upon their own familial ethnographies.