Look at these three women perched on the Fort Point rooftop in San Francisco, caught between acts of this site integrated Macbeth production, and what you’re seeing isn’t stagecraft. It’s the raw, unvarnished truth of what it means to be fully present in the middle of nowhere that matters. They’re witches, sure, but right now they’re just three people cracking up at something nobody else will ever know about, that backstage purgatory where the masks come half off and you’re neither character nor self.
That laughter… look at it. Maria in full howl, Caroline and Julie grinning like they’ve just pulled off the greatest con. This is the image that matters, not the one the audience sees. Backstage is where the real theatre happens: the cigarette breaks of the soul, the way bodies hold tension even when they think nobody’s watching, and then this, the moment when all that carefully constructed doom and prophecy just detonates into genuine human joy. Caroline Parsons, Maria Leigh, and Julie Douglas. These aren’t names on a playbill, they’re people who’ve chosen to conjure something out of salt air and military architecture, and right now they’re laughing at the beautiful absurdity of it all.
Fort Point isn’t some precious black box where theatre goes to die respectably. It’s got history ground into its bones, and these performers are wrestling with that history, with wind and fog and the bridge looming overhead like some industrial god. The photo shows that the between moments tell more truth than the spotlit ones, and that laughter, real, unguarded, the kind that bends you double, is the most honest thing three people playing witches could possibly offer.