Excavating What Dad Left Behind.

What do you do with the detritus of your dead? All those hauntingly, definitively empty clothes; the papers that fill box after box; the books and the knickknacks; the forbidding, uninhabited furniture. The performance artist Cynthia Hopkins has provided her own solution for this emotionally fraught storage problem: she wears what her father left behind. It has become her theatrical costume. Ms. Hopkins makes her entrance as a geisha-faced clown in ''The Truth: A Tragedy,'' the angry ritual of grief that she is performing at the SoHo Rep, clad in cumbersome layers that disguise her body and distort her movements. Her skirt is made of neckties. She has several caps on her head. And all sorts of things lurk beneath her outer garments, including a small bell, a Japanese kimono, a limp carrot and a long necklace of eyeglasses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]