Cynthia Hopkin’s Tsimtsum or Dylan Thomas' Last Whiskey Drunk

On Friday, April 21, we saw Tsimtsum, by Cynthia Hopkins, as part of the Sourcing Stravinsky program at the Dance Theatre Workshop. We didn't know in advance, but Tsimtsum turned out to have a connection to the Hotel Chelsea.

Hopkins came out on a dimly lighted stage, walking backwards dressed in a space suit, and asked us to imagine that she was Dylan Thomas drinking his last whiskey at the White Horse Tavern before falling from his barstool, never to regain consciousness, and dying.  She asked us to imagine that we were Dr. Cook, who I assume was Dylan’s physician, the one who pronounced his death due to what he called a severe insult to the brain. (Photo by Paula Court)  She said that right before his death, Thomas had met with Igor Stravinsky, and they had discussed composing an opera together.  This had never come about, but luckily, she, a being of an advanced race that had taken over earth after the extinction of mankind, had been able to reconstruct this opera by randomizing all of Dylan’s words, and combining them randomly with a random sample of all the notes Stravinsky had ever composed.  And now, she announced, she was going to perform that opera.

At some point she turned around, slipped out of her space suit, to reveal that she was indeed a superior being, complete with pig nose, flowerpot hairdo, and flowing gypsy robes with tiny airport bottles of Jack Daniels dangling from the fringes.  She danced slowly, purposefully, to music of her own composition.  Eerily, in a lilting voice, she sang about how the human race had committed suicide by blowing up the planet in a nuclear war.  The atmosphere of the earth had been burned off, the planet transformed into a fiery, uninhabitable desert, as the people were fried to a crisp and vaporized.  Or something like that.

All this was what Dylan contemplated in that final moment of his life as he was sliding from his barstool, on the way down to the floor.  Finally, the last whisky drunk, the earth, in cooling, reduced to a cold ashy ember, Dylan seemed to be transported back to his room at the Chelsea; he sat back in his comfy chair as the performance wound down. (Photos by Paula Court) Don’t worry, the alien assured us, though our race was dead, her people would look after the earth for us; they would just live underground for a few millennia until the planet came back to life.

I know it sounds kind of lame, but this was a much better show than my review would lead one to believe; it was a fascinating, riveting, haunting performance.  Read the NYTimes review. List of Cynthia's upcoming shows.  Buy In Memoriam: Dylan Thomas by Igor Stavinsky. Buy music by Cynthia's band, Gloria Deluxe.