There’s something deeply, irrationally beautiful about staging dead Greek shit at a racetrack. I mean, here we are: 1:15 in the afternoon, June 6th, 2015, Golden Gate Fields, where the smell of horse piss and broken dreams hangs in the air like a question nobody wants to answer. It’s 71 degrees, sunny, perfect California weather for watching tragedy unfold. And we’re doing Aeschylus. Or what’s left of him. Glaucus of Potniae, a play so lost that all we’ve got are shards, fragments, the literary equivalent of finding someone’s tooth in the rubble and trying to reconstruct their entire face from it.
But let’s talk about where we’re standing, because this place has always been about violence and transformation. This was Rancho San Antonio once, José Domingo Peralta’s land until July 1852 when John Fleming bought it and turned it into a cattle shipping operation. Picture it: cows getting herded onto boats, crossing the bay to their execution. First blood on this ground, literally. Then came the Giant Powder Company in the late 1800s, manufacturing black powder, dynamite, nitroglycerin, all the tools of American industry and American destruction. Between 1879 and 1892, the plant blew up four times. Four fucking times. You’d think someone would get the message, but no, we just kept making explosives on this cursed patch of earth.
Fast forward: they built the grandstand just before World War II. Inaugural race, February 1, 1941. Same year it showed up in Shadow of the Thin Man as a crime scene, because of course it did. Then the war came and the Navy seized it, renamed it Albany Naval Landing Force Equipment Depot, stored hundreds of landing craft destined for the Pacific theater. This ground, again, staging death. After the war ended, they went right back to racing horses.
This is IOTA. The project. The beautiful, possibly insane endeavor to perform every remaining scrap of the lost tragedies: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, the whole pantheon of ancient Greeks who understood something essential about suffering that we’ve managed to forget between our smartphones and our medicated contentment. These weren’t complete plays. They were pieces. Remnants. The things that survived when everything else burned or rotted or just got erased by time’s casual indifference.
And where do you stage this archeological theater? Not in some sterile black box. Not in a university auditorium with uncomfortable seats and grant money stink. No, you do it at the racetrack, where people go to watch beautiful animals run themselves into oblivion, where desperation wears a cheap suit and hope costs two dollars a ticket. You do it on land that’s been consecrated by cattle blood and nitroglycerin and war machinery and desperate gamblers. You do it for 2,756 people who showed up that day, probably not knowing what the hell they were about to witness. Eight minutes and twenty seconds. That’s all it took. Eight minutes and twenty seconds to perform fragments that have survived 2,500 years.
Because that’s honest, isn’t it? That’s where tragedy actually lives: not in museums, but in the margins, in the places where loss and longing do their daily business, where the ground itself remembers every kind of ending. The fragments demand this kind of recklessness. Aeschylus wrote about Glaucus, some poor bastard who got eaten by his own horses, driven mad, everything going sideways in that particular Greek way where divine punishment and human folly get so tangled you can’t tell them apart anymore. All we have are pieces of that story, and maybe that’s perfect. Maybe incompleteness is the point. Maybe standing there at Golden Gate Fields under that perfect 71 degree sun, speaking these ancient, broken words over the PA system for eight minutes and twenty seconds while the horses thunder past on ground that’s exploded and bled and shipped bodies off to war, we’re closer to the truth than any pristine production could ever get. This place understands fragments. It’s built on them. And for those 2,756 people, for that brief, strange moment, so were we.