photo: Paula Court
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Accidental Nostalgia is an operetta about the pros and cons of amnesia. The main character is one Cameron Seymour, a neurologist specializing in the memory function of the brain, who is delivering a lecture about an autobiographical book she has just published called How to Change Your Mind: A Self-Help Manual for Psychogenic Amnesiacs. She begins to tell the audience the story of the research she did to write the book, which was an investigation of her own psychogenic (emotionally driven) amnesia. The audience then follows her journey back to the house she grew up in - located in her home town of Carlson, Georgia - where she hopes to trigger missing memories of her childhood, and to find her father, from whom she has been estranged for many years. It turns out that her father is missing and that she is wanted for his murder, though it is unknown whether he was murdered, committed suicide, or simply disappeared...... and from that point on, the show becomes a bit of a thriller.
The narrative of Accidental Nostalgia is punctuated by songs, dance numbers, and interactions with peripheral characters who appear on a large film projection screen. The screen also serves to shift the atmosphere via projections of text and images, manipulated live by designers/performers Findlay and Sugg. It is a hybrid form containing hybrid content, from the outlandish to the philosophical to the deeply personal. It is a mixture of truth and fiction, song and text, movement and stillness.
"Accidental Nostalgia offers a perverse delight of incongruities- first and foremost, a narrative of childhood molestation delivered via stoical Power Point presentation and 'alt-country' songs that range in tone from pensive to nonchalant."
- The Village Voice
"It's timeless, it's true, and it's hauntingly lovely."
-The Philadelphia Inquirer
The narrative of Accidental Nostalgia is punctuated by songs, dance numbers, and interactions with peripheral characters who appear on a large film projection screen. The screen also serves to shift the atmosphere via projections of text and images, manipulated live by designers/performers Findlay and Sugg. It is a hybrid form containing hybrid content, from the outlandish to the philosophical to the deeply personal. It is a mixture of truth and fiction, song and text, movement and stillness.
"Accidental Nostalgia offers a perverse delight of incongruities- first and foremost, a narrative of childhood molestation delivered via stoical Power Point presentation and 'alt-country' songs that range in tone from pensive to nonchalant."
- The Village Voice
"It's timeless, it's true, and it's hauntingly lovely."
-The Philadelphia Inquirer
