Mystery woman Cynthia Hopkins’s haunting Nostalgia BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Accidental Nostalgia Written and directed by Cynthia Hopkins. With Cynthia Hopkins, Jim Findlay, and Jeff Sugg. At Perishable Theatre through December 14.

When Cynthia Hopkins workshopped Accidental Nostalgia at AS220 last winter, the piece was a bare-bones affair, static. Performed mostly at a table, à la Spalding Gray, it was a recital of a promising plotline.

Well, after a year pupating in the chrysalis of Hopkins’s multimedia creativity, what has emerged next door at Perishable Theatre is a colorful flight of imagination indeed. With a five-person band and 15 songs by Hopkins, imaginative video projections designed by Jim Findlay and Jeff Sugg, and choreographed movement that Jordana Toback collaborated on, the nearly two intermissionless hours of Accidental Nostalgia, which is billed as an operetta, breeze by like a page-turner at the beach.

It’s a thoughtful page-turner — Le Carre, not Mickey Spillane. There’s the mystery of a murder, but that’s to amuse us and get some suspense momentum going. The real mystery is ongoing, concerning the gap-riddled past of a woman who introduces herself as Cameron Seymour (Hopkins). She says she’s a neurologist whose specialty is the brain’s memory function. Her lecture details the mechanics of psychogenic amnesia, which she suffers from, and details how the brain records engrams, memory snapshots easily altered in the worried mind’s own Photoshop. There are periods in her childhood that she can’t remember, when she might have been sexually abused by her father. As the plot thickens, we learn that her father is missing and may have been murdered. Is this all building up, we wonder, to a shedunit?

Act two takes place in Georgia, as she relates returning home to find cues to jog her memories and clues to what happened to her father. The performance gets more entertaining here — though from the outset the tone lightly enfolds the many ironic opportunities of memory loss in a reassuring embrace. Slipping out of her affectless persona as the lecturer, Hopkins is a hoot as a brash, henna-headed police station receptionist in a video projection conversation with herself. The last act brings her to Morocco, to find her past in a Paul Bowles-like expatriate writer.

But the story isn’t the offering here, the process is. Accidental Nostalgia is satisfyingly theatrical. As the lecturer dryly presents information about the memory process or about the book How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, passages and text pages flow on the screen behind her. As she relates what she remembers from her childhood, not only do we see family album photos, but we get a real-time black-and-white video.

In it, Findlay passes his hand against her mismatched footwear — a strapped pump and a cowboy boot, to change her gait along with her identity as she is on the run — and close to her body as it lies on a medical examination table, and into her blouse. Chilling, and as apt as an engram brought to life. Sugg also joins Hopkins on stage in incidental roles. He and Findlay designed the set and sit at stage right as they work the video projections on PowerBooks.

The play is the story of narrator Seymour’s transformation into a person no longer searching for who she was, but now satisfied with who she is. That’s an ambitious attempt, and it would be conveyed more successfully with a more convincing emotional arc. It’s ironic that while Hopkins is superbly convincing acting the parts of two women with strong feelings — the second is Seymour’s sister — she has some trouble coming across as natural as the narrator/lecturer. I guess it’s harder to pretend to be a character who thinks she feels little when you know she feels so much.

New York music scene cool might be interfering in that last matter. Hopkins, a 31-year-old Brown grad, fronts the band Gloria Deluxe and warbles in a countrified twang at other opportunities. She earned a 2001 Bessie for performing her songs in Big Dance Theater’s Another Telepathic Thing. (There are plenty of her songs at www.gloriadeluxe.com ) The baker’s dozen-plus we get here are a charming lot, considering their sometimes dark moods, typical subject matter being how unrecoverable the past is. There is no self-pity in sight.

If Accidental Nostalgia presented nothing better than "Peeling Away the Layers," a haunting duet with a video of the narrator’s 11-year-old daughter (Maria Ventura), the evening would be worth our time. As it is, we get much, much more.