Backstage Nausicaä: in wildflowers for Sophocles tragedy at Pillar Point…
Here, in the weeds behind the curtain, where ancient Greek tragedy meets California wildflowers. Judy moving through that grass like she’s already halfway to Phaeacia,
This is what you never see: the in-between, the breath before the dive.
The wildflowers don’t give a shit about your PhD or that you’re at capacity. They just bloom. And she’s there, in it, pure and temporary as theater always is. This moment, trampled grass, salt air, fragments of a dead playwright, this is where the truth lives. Not in the polished performance but in this, following someone through flowers at Pillar Point, chasing fragments of something 2,500 years old that somehow still bleeds. Theater at the edge of the continent, where the Pacific crashes and nobody’s safe and the whole thing could fall apart any second. That’s honest. That’s real. Ancient Greeks knew: you perform at the mercy of the gods and the weather and your own fragile mortality.
I love all insider memoirs. It doesn’t matter whether it’s truck-drivers or doctors. I think everybody likes to go backstage, find out what people think and what they talk about and what specialized job they have.
David Mamet