So Odysseus moved out . . . about to mingle with all those lovely girls, naked now as he was, for the need drove him on, a terrible sight, all crusted, caked with brine– they scattered in panic down the jutting beaches. Only Alcinous’ daughter held fast, for Athena planted courage within her heart, dissolved the trembling in her limbs, and she firmly stood her ground and faced Odysseus, torn now– Should he fling his arms around her knees, the young beauty, plead for help, or stand back, plead with a winning word, beg her to lead him to the town and lend him clothing? Homer, Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles
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.
The gesture must be correct.
If the gesture is correct,
your mind really creates the reality of the figure,
and it is not necessary to hang on all the rest… Nathan Oliveira
Actually, I do happen to resemble a hallucination. Kindly note my silhouette in the moonlight.” The cat climbed into the shaft of moonlight and wanted to keep talking but was asked to be quiet. “Very well, I shall be silent,” he replied, “I shall be a silent hallucination.” Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
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.
He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist. Saint Francis of Assisi
You must learn not what people round you consider good or bad, but to act in life as your conscience bids you. An untrammelled conscience will always know more than all the books and teachers put together. G.I. Gurdjieff, Meetings With Remarkable Men
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.
In Italian museums are sometimes found little painted screens that the priest used to hold in front of the face of condemned men to hide the scaffold from them. Albert Camus
