Must Go See It: Cynthia Hopkins @ On the Boards

Cynthia Hopkins @ On the Boards
Through Sunday, May 6; Tickets $24

Frankly, it's a delusion that we can discuss art -- if by that we meant we could, by telling you about Cynthia Hopkins' Must Don't Whip 'Um, persuade you how good it is. Once we were talking with the sculptor Jun Kaneko about his obelisks and someone perplexedly burst out with, "Sure, but what do they mean?" Kaneko smiled and said, "If I could say that, I wouldn't have sculpted them."

So what we end up doing, in fact, is vivisecting performance, telling you stories about parts, moments you might like. Here's our Gothamist hive-mind on the narrative you might like:

The ingenuously convoluted story centers on the 1979 farewell concert by cult-pop star Cameron Seymour, who famously fled, Cat Stevens-style, from the music industry (and her C.I.A. minders) to live the life of a devout Sufi in Morocco. Her daughter Mary Fern, also played by Hopkins, was two years old at the time of her disappearance; she’s now an adult filmmaker literally haunted by Seymour’s ghost.

Fern’s work-in-process documentary, Must Don’t Whip ‘Um, probes her mother’s motivation for leaving daughter and career behind, and tries to determine whether Seymour is still alive. The documentary, which is projected at intervals above the stage, depicts Fern’s first-hand accounts of her perilous journey to Morocco in search of Seymour, hilarious interviews with those who knew her mother in her prime and "archival" footage from her last concert.

Maybe you'd like the full band, Gloria Deluxe, and Hopkins' late-'70s pop avatar (to our ears, child of Janis Joplin, sister of Natalie Merchant, and mother of Cat Power). 10 songs later, you feel like you've seen the farewell concert and revisited it being memorialized. If you are hip but elderly and wearing earplugs against loud noises, we recommend that you not sit in the front row next to the speakers and clap your hands violently to your ears when the drums crank up. That's distracting.

Maybe you will like the escapist mother vs. abandoned daughter dynamic, the Sufist single-minded devotion to God's love vs. the commercial pressures of the entertainment industry, the political statement made by anything Islamic, the women-on-the-verge, how the personal intrudes on documentary objectivity, the ghostly video/real-life interactions, the backstage insights on band antics and the struggle for arts funding -- well, now it's all in pieces. We've probably broken it.

The beauty is in how it all fits together, there on stage, where the art is going on.