Euripides No Man's Friend • Jamie Lyons

Euripides No Man’s Friend

Here’s what you need to understand: 5:55 in the goddamn morning, July 1st, 2015, we’re doing Euripides, or what’s left of him, anyway, some scrap of text that survived the wholesale cultural annihilation of everything that mattered, everything that was true. No Man’s Friend, they call it informally, because even the Greeks knew that sometimes the only honest position is to be nobody’s fucking pal.

This is IOTA. The whole mad project: bringing back the fragments of the lost plays, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, the ones that didn’t make it, the ones that got burned or forgotten or simply erased by the grinding machinery of time and cultural indifference. I’m talking about reconstructing meaning from shards, from broken pieces, from the archaeological wreckage of what used to be whole.

Aquatic Park, San Francisco. Sixty-two degrees. Partly cloudy. The kind of morning where reality feels negotiable. Six and a half minutes of performance. Eleven people saw it: three joggers who probably thought we were performance art nutjobs (they weren’t wrong), one baby who had no choice in the matter, and seven others who actually showed up on purpose to watch us resurrect fragments of dead language on a beach made of death itself.

Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about Aquatic Park: you’re standing on tombstones. Actual headstones. The markers that once meant something to someone, here lies whoever, beloved whatever, now they’re just municipal fill, WPA project rubble, the stuff you build beaches from when you decide the dead are taking up too much valuable real estate.

By 1902, San Francisco said no more burials in the city. Too crowded, too expensive, too inconvenient for the living. By 1921, they’re shoveling the dead out to Colma like so much inconvenient baggage. By 1941, the cemeteries are ghost stories. The early dead, miners, immigrants, loners, the ones who came here with nothing and left with less—they wound up in mass graves, anonymous, interchangeable. Their tombstones became construction material. Their names got buried under municipal progress.

So when we perform fragments of lost Greek tragedy on ground made from forgotten tombstones, we’re not being clever or ironic. We’re just telling the truth about what it means to make art in a culture that treats memory like garbage. The fragments speak to fragments. The lost call to the lost. And somewhere, beneath our feet, all those nameless dead are the only audience that really understands.