The Impossibility of Cynthia Hopkins: Or, Can Autobiographical Musical Performance Save the Space Program?

The Success of Failure (or, the Failure of Success), written and performed by Cynthia Hopkins, with Jim Findlay and Jeff Sugg, directed by D.J. Mendel, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn, NY, May 22–June 7, 2009.

The future of America’s space program is in jeopardy.

Against the background of a highly charged political year—a landmark election in the U.S., another in Iran, and worldwide economic depression, to name a few events—a programmatic and ideological split within NASA may as well exist, well, in a vacuum in space. But a brief piece in the May 23, 2009 Washington Post discusses the simple yet significant dilemma: is money better spent on maintenance or invention. At the center of the debate is the nineteen-year-old Hubble telescope, now in need of a shuttle to make adjustments and repairs. Hubble team leader David Leck-rone stirred up quite a bit of controversy, with strong words against his employer, saying, “It just makes me want to cry to think that this is the end of it. [ . . . ] There is no person out there, there is no leadership out there, there is no vision out there to pick up the baton that we’re about to hand off and carry it forward.” NASA, it seems, is at a flash point where it must decide whether to continually reinvent its missions and objectives at the risk of forsaking past achievements, or to slow down and pay better attention to the past, nurture it, and help it survive. All of this rhetoric comes at a vital time, when space exploration has all but fallen out of public and international spotlights. NASA is struggling for visibility and, by extension, survival.

Interest and, more importantly, fascination with space exploration seems to be dwindling: politically, without a Cold War mentality for scientific competition; economically, with more immediate concerns for health care, the stock exchange, and environmental imperatives; and ideologically, with new focuses on genetics, stem cells, and string theory appearing sexier than a clunky, costly international space station. Even George W. Bush’s 2004 call to return to the moon and “reinvent the space program,” amidst an absurdly broad policy of U.S. domination and superiority, seemed half-hearted.

The cultural imagination has shifted as well: it seems that the xenophobic, and often racist and sexist, invader movies reflect a changing conception of the Other. Recent remakes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, simply called The Invasion (2007), and The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), quality aside, made drastic changes from their originals (1956 and 1951, respectively), that viewed aliens as a race of bloodthirsty war-mongerers, threatening our nationhoods and imperialisms (even E.T. [1982] had this darker military subplot), to more capitalist-themed threats to radical individualism, subjective consciousness, and responsibility.

It comes as no surprise, then, that performance has also picked up on this paradigm. In the past year, the Wooster Group staged the Baroque opera La Didone in space, deconstructing myth and classical, “timeless” cults of genius and aesthetics. The Axis Company set its yearly serial drama, Hospital, aboard the aptly named Earheart space station to reflect the inner workings of its captain’s consciousness. Most notable, however, is Cynthia Hopkins’s culmination of her “Accinosco Trilogy,” The Success of Failure (or, The Failure of Success).

For the past six years, Hopkins has been producing and performing this musical-autobiographical odyssey in a therapeutic effort to examine and possibly recuperate her past, of which vast sections are absent to her due to alcoholism and psychogenic amnesia. In part one, Accidental Nostalgia, Hopkins played neurologist Cameron Seymour, delivering a lecture to the audience on the subject of amnesia—its causes and effects upon the brain (see Patricia Coleman’s “La Belle Indifference,” PAJ 81, 2005). Inadvertently, Dr. Seymour begins to play out her own memories and gaps, eventually discovering that her miserable youth was adoptive, and that her birth mother was a 1970s pop icon. This lead directly to episode two, Must Don’t Whip ’Um, in which documentary filmmaker Mary Seymour...