At 4:45pm on November 16th, 2018, a cold, gray, 54 degree afternoon, we staged the two remaining fragments of Aeschylus‘ Danaids at the Pulgas Water Temple in San Mateo County.
Let me be clear about what we’re dealing with here: Aeschylus’s Danaids trilogy is mostly gone. Lost to time, fire, neglect, pick your poison. What survives is The Suppliants and a handful of fragments. Tantalizing scraps. We performed two of them.
Fragment 44: Aphrodite’s speech. Seven lines celebrating the universal power of love and desire in nature, how even divine forces drive unions, how the sky desires to penetrate the earth, how everything in the cosmos is basically horny. Beautiful stuff. Cosmic.
And then there’s Fragment 43: the wedding night massacre. The morning after. Fifty bridegrooms, dead by their brides’ hands. The Danaids, who killed their husbands rather than submit to forced marriage. Disobedience to their father Danaus. Defiance of the gods’ will for union. Blood on the sheets instead of the expected kind.
The contrast is the whole point. Love’s creative power versus its violent rejection. Aphrodite’s hymn to desire set against a bride with a knife.
This is part of IOTA, a project with a premise that sounds either brilliant or completely unhinged depending on your blood alcohol level: bring back to life, with site specific performances, every surviving fragment of the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The stuff that didn’t make it. The bits and pieces.
Fifteen minutes. Five people, maybe six, depends on whether you count the creepy guy who might have just been waiting for someone.
Here’s the thing: this isn’t my first time at the Pulgas Water Temple. Years earlier, back when I was an undergraduate at Stanford, ambitious, probably insufferable, I wrote an adaptation of the Japanese Noh play Aya no Tsuzumi. Chris Salter, another mentee of Carl Weber, absurdly talented, directed. So there’s a symmetry to it, I guess. Same impulse to make something beautiful and strange happen in a place most people just drive past on their way to somewhere else.
The Fragments:
And then will come the brilliant light of the sun, I will graciously awake the bridal couples, enchanting them with song with a choir of youths and maidens.
APHRODITE: The holy Heaven passionately desires to penetrate the Earth, and passionate desire takes hold of Earth for union with Heaven. Rain falls from the brimming fountains of Heaven and makes Earth conceive, and she brings forth for mortals grazing for their flocks, cereals to sustain their life, and the fruit of trees: by the wedlock of the rain she comes to her fulfilment. Of this, I am in part the cause.
The Location:
The Pulgas Water Temple is a monument to one of those massive, hubristic infrastructure projects that could only happen in America. The Hetch Hetchy Project: 160 miles of engineered ambition dragging water from the Sierra Nevada Mountains all the way to the Bay Area. Twenty-four years of construction, straight through the Great Depression. $102 million, which in 1934 money is, well, an obscene amount.
Above the columns, there’s a frieze that reads: “I give waters in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, to give drink to my people.” Biblical. Grand. The kind of thing you inscribe when you’re trying to make flooding a pristine valley sound like divine providence.
William Merchant designed it in the Beaux Arts style, he studied under Bernard Maybeck, the guy who gave us the Palace of Fine Arts. So Merchant knew his stuff. He went with fluted columns, Corinthian capitals, the whole Classical greatest hits package. A love letter to the Greeks and Romans, whose engineering tricks they were basically stealing to pull off this modern miracle of plumbing.
And then there’s Albert Bernasconi, master stone carver, the guy who actually made it real. Who took Merchant’s drawings and turned them into something you could touch. The craftsman. Because that’s how these things work, architects get the credit, but it’s the Bernasconis of the world who do the backbreaking labor of making dreams solid.
Collaborators:
I did this with Tonyanna and Ryan, collaborators who get it, who understand that sometimes the most meaningful work happens for almost no one, in the cold, at a monument most people drive past without a second thought.
