Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. William Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream
So I’m wearing a donkey head in Lafayette Park. Out there with the unhoused who’ve seen better Lears performed on actual street corners, with joggers who time their routes to avoid my soliloquies, with couples making out on blankets who couldn’t care less that I’m channeling four hundred years of theatrical tradition through a papier-mâché ass head that smells like someone’s art school farts.
The San Francisco Shakespeare Festival gets it, or maybe they just don’t have a choice. I’m performing for free, which means I’m performing for anyone, which means I’m performing for no one in particular, which somehow becomes everyone. The drunk guy heckling me is more engaged than half the people who paid $200 for orchestra seats at the War Memorial. Bottom’s supposed to be ridiculous, transformed against his will into something absurd, and hell, isn’t that just standing there in your street clothes realizing I’ve volunteered for this? Did I?
There’s something fundamentally punk about outdoor Shakespeare, this refusal to be precious, this insistence that the words can take the punishment of reality. Wind knocking over your props. Sirens mid-monologue. The smell of weed drifting over from the drum circle. It’s messier and truer and somehow it matters more when Puck’s talking about what fools these mortals be while actual fools are wandering through your fourth-wall-free disaster of a playing space.
Poseidon god of the earthquake launched a colossal wave, terrible, murderous, arching over him, pounding down on him, hard as a windstorm blasting piles of dry parched chaff, scattering flying husks… The Odyssey, Robert Fagles trans.
There’s something nobody tells you about being a kid at rehearsal. How the adults stop being adults for a minute. How they shed all that bullshit, the mortgage anxiety, the careful professional face, the parental authority, and become something else entirely. Something rawer. Something that plays.
I grew up in rehearsal spaces. Theaters that smelled like dust and old wood and somebody’s forgotten coffee. My father’s rehearsals. And what I learned, what got hardwired into my neural pathways before I could even articulate it, was this: this is where the real shit happens. Not in the performance. Not when everyone’s watching. But here. In the mess. In the trying.
Elena’s working magic in these pictures, but she doesn’t know it yet. She’s just being a kid at rehearsal. Maybe she’s bored. Maybe she’s transfixed. Maybe she’s building entire universes out of whatever detritus is lying around the Wave Organ while the grown-ups do their thing.
But she’s absorbing something else too. She’s learning that adults, these supposedly finished, decided people, are actually just making it all up as they go. That they fuck up. That they laugh at themselves. That they chase something they can’t quite name, over and over, until they nail it or time runs out.
That’s the power of it. Watching adults play. Really play. Not the sanitized, performative version they do for kids. But the desperate, hungry, hilarious, occasionally pathetic version they do for themselves. The version where they fall on their faces and get back up and try the same goddamn line seventeen different ways because it matters.
You can’t teach that. You can only witness it.
And if you’re lucky enough to be a kid at rehearsal, to see your father or your mother or the adults in your orbit drop the mask and chase the thing they actually give a shit about, it rewires you. Forever. You learn that the interesting stuff happens in the attempting. That failure is just part of the process. That play isn’t something you outgrow; it’s something you fight to protect.
Elena’s just there. Just present. Just working her own quiet magic while the Wave Organ breathes and the Lauen and Derek chase their moment.
Built in 1937, Memorial Auditorium squats at the heart of Stanford’s campus, a monument to the dead of World War I that somehow became a venue for everything from visiting orchestras to corporate motivational speakers hawking the next big disruption.
The interior is vast and unforgiving. Those hard seats don’t give a damn about my comfort, they’re designed for endurance, for sitting through three hour lectures on epistemology or watching some visiting dignitary drone on about innovation while outside, California sunshine mocks my indoor imprisonment. The acoustics are decent if imperfect, which means I can hear every cough, every whispered complaint, every shuffle of discomfort echoing through the cavernous space.
But here’s the thing: when something real happens inside those walls, when a speaker actually has something urgent to say, when a performance transcends the academic sterility, the room transforms. Suddenly I’m not in some administrative checkbox labeled “multipurpose venue.” I’m in a space that remembers what it was supposed to be: a place where ideas and sounds could shake people loose from their comfortable assumptions.
The building is stubbornly itself, neither intimate nor grandiose, neither cutting edge nor nostalgic. Just there, doing its job, housing whatever fervent expression or tedious obligation the university throws at it, indifferent to both acclaim and contempt, waiting for the next moment of genuine intensity to justify its existence.
Two generations of women who’ve spent their lives insisting that the body means something beyond what commerce wants to sell us, beyond what convention wants to contain. Anna Halprin, 90 something years deep into the radical proposition that movement is democratic, that anybody’s dance matters, holding hands with Tonyanna Borkovi, who’s out there with me staging Aeschylus at water temples and Genet in abandoned mints like some kind of beautiful lunatic committed to the idea that theater should happen where life actually vibrates.
There’s something almost unbearably pure about this image. Not pure like sanitized, but pure like uncut. Two people who never bought the lie that art needs permission or a proper venue or the right credentials. Anna made her mark by putting cancer survivors and housewives and people who’d never danced a step in their lives into circles on mountaintops, declaring that moving together could heal, could matter, could be enough. No virtuosity Olympics, no graduate degree gatekeeping, just bodies in space doing what bodies do when they’re honest.
And here’s Tonyanna, carrying that torch into abandoned architecture, into parks after dark, into places where the ghosts of other purposes still hang thick in the air. Site specific doesn’t begin to cover it. She’s making theater that treats the world like it’s still wild, still available for transformation, still refusing to be just backdrop for our bullshit.
“Every experience I’ve had in my life is a resource in my body,” Anna says. That’s the whole revolution right there. Not rejecting the past, not transcending trauma, not achieving some Instagram perfect enlightenment. Just recognizing that my scars and my joy and my weird Tuesday afternoon revelations are all material. Everything counts. Nothing’s wasted.
These two know something most people spend their whole lives avoiding: that art worth making usually requires you to look like a fool, to work without a net, to believe in something so intensely that the reasonable people will think you’ve lost your mind. Anna dancing with terminal cancer patients. Tonyanna staging Greek tragedy in a crumbling palace. Same impulse. The refusal to let death or commerce or good sense have the last word.
The establishment calls this kind of work “experimental,” which is just another way of saying it makes them nervous. Because what Anna and Tonyanna traffic in isn’t experiment. It’s lived experience converted directly into form. No middleman. No polish to make it palatable. Just the raw insistence that human beings moving through space with intention is inherently meaningful.
That photograph catches them at the Museum of Performance + Design, which is perfect. Because what is performance but the design of ephemeral meaning? What they’re holding between those clasped hands is the thread that connects every weird workshop, every mountain dance, every play staged in an “inappropriate” location. The thread that says: this matters because we say it matters, because we showed up and made it matter.
Kindred spirits. Yeah. Except that makes it sound accidental, like they stumbled into the same energy. But this is deliberate kinship. The kind you earn by refusing every easy out, every comfortable compromise, every opportunity to just do the normal thing and collect your paycheck and let the machine grind on without you.
They’re holding hands like conspirators. Because that’s what they are.
Buildings without foundations will inevitably come down. I can be fooled, but my kids won’t be… either we will correct what’s wrong, it will be corrected for us. JamesBaldwin, Take This Hammer
We’re real good at forgetting where we buried the bodies. Or in this case, where we buried the plutonium.
Hunters Point. Say it out loud. Sounds almost pastoral, doesn’t it? Like some weekend getaway where you’d spot deer at dusk, then kill them. But what got hunted here was different. What got pointed at was communities that didn’t have the right ZIP codes or the right lawyers or the right skin color to say “fuck you” loud enough that anyone gave a damn.
The Navy came through mid-century like they owned the place, which, legally, they did, and they did what militaries do when nobody’s watching: they made a mess. Radiological experiments. Atomic testing. The whole Cold War greatest hits album of “we’ll worry about that later.” Except “later” arrived decades ago, and we’re still pretending we can’t hear it knocking.
Now it’s condos and promises and community benefits packages wrapped in PowerPoint presentations that smell like cover up with notes of liability waiver. The dirt tests keep coming back hot. The cleanup crew keeps getting busted for falsifying records. And the people who’ve lived in the shadow of that shipyard, who breathed its air, who raised kids on its soil, they keep getting sold the same tired line about progress and revitalization and how this time, this time, we promise we got all the poison out.
Here’s what my photographs know that the press releases don’t: you can’t crop out a superfund site. You can’t filter radiation. And you can’t build luxury housing on top of institutional betrayal and call it urban renewal.
See the rest. ☞Click here☜. Look at what they don’t want you looking at.
She was the kind of woman who understood, fundamentally, that comfort is the enemy of everything worth doing, that real power doesn’t come from being liked but from being necessary when everything’s falling apart.
In the art world she knew every hustle, spotted every inflated price, every lazy shortcut passed off as craftsmanship. Storekeepers saw her coming and straightened up like school kids when the principal walks in. She had that quality that cuts through bullshit like a hot knife through margarine, that made mediocrity feel like the moral failing it actually is. She demanded what she paid for, what she was promised, what she deserved, and somehow that made her the problem.
But when the wheels came off, when someone’s life hit the guardrail and started flipping end over end, that’s when she became essential. Crisis stripped away all the social theater and revealed her for what she was: the person you needed. The one who showed up. The one who knew what to do when nobody else did, who had the spine to make the hard call, to sit with someone’s pain without flinching, to tell them what they needed to hear instead of what would make them feel better.
She was the raw material of greatness, hers, yes, but more importantly the kind she forged in others. Because she never let them settle. Never let them be less than they could be. And that kind of love doesn’t come wrapped in softness.
There’s this thing that happens when you walk into a space like YBCA and someone’s decided to call the thing a retrospective. That word alone, retrospective, it’s already half-dead on arrival, embalmed in institutional reverence before the first note even sounds. But what I’m getting from this image, from whatever the hell Luciano conjured in that particular moment, is something altogether more feral and unfinished.
The photograph doesn’t give you much, and maybe that’s the point. There’s an audience; you can feel them, the way they’re leaning in or pulling back, and there’s this sense that something happened or is about to happen, that razor-edge moment where art stops being polite. What gets me is that Luciano’s working in a form that’s supposed to be respectable now, canonized even, this whole lineage of experimental composition and sonic exploration. But the real ones, the ones who actually mattered, they never wanted that kind of mausoleum treatment. They wanted to crack you open.
And here’s where it gets tricky, right? Because a retrospective is basically saying, “Here’s what this person was,” like you’re already writing the obituary while they’re still breathing. It’s the art world’s way of filing you away, putting you in the permanent collection of Things That Were Once Dangerous But Are Now Safe To Discuss At Cocktail Parties. Luciano’s trafficking in noise, in disruption, in the kind of performance that should make you uncomfortable, and then some curator comes along and throws a spotlight on it, frames it, gives it a title card.
The real question isn’t whether the work still has teeth. The question is whether the context has already pulled those teeth, sanitized the whole damn thing. Because once you’re in a place like YBCA, with its clean walls and its fundraising galas, you’re already compromised. The institution wants you to be radical in ways that don’t actually threaten anything, that give the donors something to feel sophisticated about while they sip their wine.
But maybe, and this is where I’m talking myself in circles, which is exactly what this kind of work should make you do, maybe the fact that it happened at all, that someone got up there and made something that refused easy consumption, that’s worth something. Even if it’s trapped in amber, even if the retrospective format is inherently contradictory to the spirit of the thing itself. You show up, you bear witness, you let it mess with your head a little. And then you walk out into the night and try to figure out what the hell you just experienced, why it mattered, whether it mattered at all.
LOOK AT THIS MAGNIFICENT BASTARD. Stanford University, mid 1960s, some production of Love’s Labour’s Lost that probably nobody remembers except it’s Shakespeare and Shakespeare MATTERS because Shakespeare understood that language is the only weapon we’ve got against the void, the only thing standing between us and the screaming abyss of meaninglessness, and here’s Chuck Lyons, Charlie, CHARLES R. LYONS, standing there in period costume looking like he believes every single impossible word.
Because that’s what it takes, right? BELIEF. Absolute conviction that these four-hundred-year-old words about love being labor being lost being found again MEAN SOMETHING. That standing on a stage and speaking in iambic pentameter isn’t just some academic exercise but a way of reaching into the audience’s chest and squeezing their hearts until they remember what it feels like to be alive.
And here’s the beautiful part, the part that makes this REAL: Margery Bailey, the Shakespeare goddess whose name would eventually be on his endowed chair, kicked him out of her class for falling asleep. KICKED HIM OUT. The irony is so perfect it hurts. The guy who would dedicate his life to understanding what she taught him about Shakespeare couldn’t even stay awake in her class. Maybe he was up all night rehearsing, maybe he was working some job to pay tuition, maybe he was just young and stupid and exhausted from partying and trying to do everything at once. Doesn’t matter. She threw him out, and that rejection, that FAILURE, probably taught him more than any A+ ever could have.
Because that’s how it works, right? The people who matter most are the ones who refuse to let you coast. Who demand everything. Who kick you out when you’re not giving it. And then you spend the rest of your life trying to prove you were worth their time.
And this is before everything, before the PhD, before he becomes this heavyweight theater theorist writing about Brecht and Beckett, before he’s chairing departments and installing new programs and basically teaching half of America how to think about performance. Before he’s directing Endgame and wrestling with Ibsen’s divided consciousness and all that heavy intellectual machinery that would come later.
This is just pure, undiluted DOING. Acting because he had to. BUT WAIT, because here’s where it gets REALLY good, before all this, before Stanford, before standing on this stage in this costume speaking these words, he was IN IT. The real thing. The Hollywood thing. Hanging out with Natalie Wood, the one from Rebel Without a Cause and West Side Story and a million other films that defined what it meant to be young and beautiful and doomed in 1950s America. Friends with Dennis Hopper before he was the Dennis Hopper we know, back when he was just another crazy talented kid trying to make it. Parties at Nicholas Ray’s bungalow at the CHATEAU MARMONT, Nicholas Ray, the director who made Rebel Without a Cause, who understood teenage rage and loneliness better than anyone, who basically invented the modern American outsider film.
Chuck was THERE. In the rooms. At the parties. Part of that whole gorgeous, doomed, brilliant Hollywood scene that was about to explode into the Method and the New Hollywood and everything that would come after.
And he WALKED AWAY FROM IT.
Or maybe, maybe IT WALKED AWAY FROM HIM TOO. Maybe he wasn’t quite pretty enough or connected enough or willing to play the game hard enough. Maybe Natalie Wood moved on. Maybe Dennis Hopper had other friends. Maybe the invitations to Nicholas Ray’s bungalow dried up. Maybe Hollywood chewed him up a little and spit him out like it does to thousands of talented kids every year.
Maybe the choice to go to Stanford wasn’t entirely A CHOICE. Maybe it was partly a RETREAT. A pivot. A reassessment after realizing that the dream factory didn’t want him.
And you know what? THAT MAKES IT BETTER. That makes it REAL. Because then going to Stanford isn’t about some noble rejection of shallow Hollywood values, it’s about a Glendale kid who got knocked down and said FINE, I’LL FIND ANOTHER WAY. I’ll go deeper. I’ll understand this thing from the inside.
And then Margery Bailey KICKED HIM OUT of her class for falling asleep.
The narrative arc is too perfect. Kid dates a movie star, hangs out with the future legends of American cinema, has access to everything young beautiful ambitious people in the 1950s could want, it doesn’t quite work out, so he goes to Stanford to study Shakespeare and gets thrown out of class.
THAT’S the story. Not some romanticized tale of artistic purity choosing academia over commerce. But a messier, truer story about someone who kept finding ways forward even when the doors kept slamming in his face.
And yes, he’d already been a professional actor at the Pasadena Playhouse, already knew the score, but this wasn’t just about acting, this was about CHOOSING the life of the mind over the life of the scene. Choosing to understand the THEORY behind the practice, the WHY beneath the HOW, the philosophical bedrock under all that beautiful desperate playacting we call theater.
That’s the thing about the real ones, they’re never satisfied with just doing it. They need to know what it MEANS. They need to crack it open and look at the guts and figure out how the magic trick works, and then, AND THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART, they need to teach other people how to do the same thing.
Because theater isn’t about immortality or legacy or any of that horseshit. It’s about the moment when the lights go down and someone speaks words into the darkness and for a few hours everyone in that room agrees to believe in something together. It’s about the fundamental human need to tell stories to each other, to see ourselves reflected in someone else’s performance of what it means to be human.
Look at him there, young and committed and completely unaware that he’d spend the next few decades of his life thinking about exactly this moment, this convergence of text and body and voice and meaning. That he’d become the guy explaining to generations of students why this matters, why we keep doing this absurd thing of pretending to be other people in order to understand ourselves.
AND HERE’S THE THING, the person writing this, the person looking at this photograph and trying to make sense of it? I’m HIS SON. Jamie Lyons. Who ALSO went to Stanford. Who ALSO has a career in theater and performance. Who’s spent his own life wrestling with spectacle and live art and what it means to stand in front of people and create meaning out of nothing.
So this isn’t some objective historical analysis. This is a son trying to understand a father by looking at a photograph from before he was born. Trying to connect the dots between this kid in Shakespeare costume and the man who would raise him, who would pass down some DNA level understanding that theater MATTERS, that performance isn’t frivolous but fundamental.
You can’t escape it, can you? The things our fathers teach us, intentionally or not. The trajectories they set us on just by being who they are. Charles Lyons dated Natalie Wood and hung out with Dennis Hopper and then chose Shakespeare and theory and teaching, and decades later his son is making art and performance and thinking about the same essential questions: What does it mean to perform? What does it mean to witness? What’s the relationship between the real and the represented?
IT’S ALL THERE IN THIS ONE PHOTOGRAPH. The whole lineage. The whole story of choosing art over everything else, even when art doesn’t choose you back. Of getting knocked down and finding another way. Of believing that standing on a stage and speaking words matters enough to build a life around it.
The Navy would come next, four years as a lieutenant, Far East duty, working with Jacques Cousteau which is its own kind of beautiful absurdity. Then teaching at Principia College, then Berkeley, then back to Stanford in 1973 to build something that would outlast him.
But here, right here in this photograph, he’s just a kid who loved Shakespeare enough to put on a costume and speak the words. That’s where it all starts. That’s where it always starts. With someone young and stupid and brave enough to believe that beauty matters, that language matters, that standing in front of other people and baring your soul through someone else’s words is a worthwhile way to spend your one wild and precious life.
He died in 1999. Sixty six years old. Before that he’d established the Institute for Diversity in the Arts. Written books that changed how people think about Brecht and Beckett and Ibsen. Directed productions that people still talk about. Mentored students who went on to shape theater across America and Europe.
But man, look at this photograph. This is where the fever started. This is patient zero for a lifetime of trying to figure out what theater means, what Shakespeare means, what it means to stand in front of people and speak truth through fiction.
That’s the real love’s labor: not lost, just transformed into everything that came after.
