Don’t be shy. If you haven’t seen Accidental Nostalgia or Must Don’t Whip ‘Um, the first two parts of Cynthia Hopkin’s Accidental Trilogy, you can catch up in a giffy!
First there was the earthy, Southern-gothic road tale Accidental Nostalgia in 2005, whose narrator steals an identity and revisits her small-town past in an attempt to unravel a childhood murder mystery. Two years later its prequel, Must Don’t Whip ’Um, featured a 1970s American rocker (the one whose identity is later stolen) who renounces her career to join a Sufi brotherhood in Morocco, thus making a leap both geographically and thematically from Western pop culture to Eastern spiritual mysticism . . . even as it turned out to be a daughter’s story about her search for a mother she never knew.
The first two productions were, in Cynthia’s words “tapestries of fiction woven from strands of truth… With this new work, I’m attempting to extract the fiction from the truth and to create two Acts which are polar opposites from each other. I conceive of the trilogy as concentric circles: Part I (nostalgia) being a little circle of neurology and personal memory loss; Part II being the next circle outward from oneself, oneself in relation to father and mother and society; and Part III is the biggest circle, oneself in relation to the universe at large. Part I is the brain, Part II the heart, and Part III the spirit of the Trilogy.”
See Part III this weekend to find out what happens!
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