O, never
Shall sun that morrow see!
Your face, my thane, is as a book where men
May read strange matters. To beguile the time,
Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,
Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under’t. He that’s coming
Must be provided for: and you shall put
This night’s great business into my dispatch;
Which shall to all our nights and days to come
Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom.
Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.5
The thing about watching someone become Lady Macbeth backstage is this: I’m seeing the moment before the monster puts on her face. Not the performance, fuck the performance, but that last second when Ava Roy is still herself, before she becomes the thing that whispers murder into sleeping ears.
There’s something obscene about it. Something you’re not supposed to see. Like watching someone pray, or shoot up, or cry in a bathroom stall. It’s the private transformation, the ritual nobody talks about, the moment when an actor stops being a person and becomes a conduit for something ancient and terrible.
Shakespeare knew what he was doing with that flower-and-serpent speech. It’s not just about deception, it’s about the split, the fracture, the necessary psychosis of performing evil. Lady Macbeth has to look like herself while becoming something else entirely. And Ava’s getting ready to do exactly that, here, in this Fort Point built to kill ships and now hosting ghosts.
The backstage photo always tells you more than the performance shot. This is where the work happens. This is where the actor sits with the darkness, invites it in, makes room for it. Not Ava anymore, not quite Lady Macbeth yet. Suspended in that liminal space where all real art happens.
Site-specific theater at Fort Point means performing Shakespeare where the cold Pacific wind screams through gun ports designed for Civil War cannons that never fired a shot. Perfect place for Macbeth. Perfect place for all that murderous ambition and guilt. The architecture itself is violent, even in its abandonment.
And somewhere in that stone fortress, Ava’s about to walk onstage and convince everyone that evil is just another form of love gone wrong.