Heterogeneous Spectacles
always looking over my shoulder
Solipsism Backstage at We Players‘ Macbeth at Fort Point
“My darling,” she said at last, are you sure you don’t mind being a mouse for the rest of your life?”
“I don’t mind at all” I said.
“It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.”
Roald Dahl, The Witches
Peacock (Di Rosa Art Preserve)
I shall always remember how the peacocks’ tails shimmered when the moon rose amongst the tall trees, and on the shady bank the emerging mermaids gleamed fresh and silvery amongst the rocks…
Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East
Fort Point, Take Two: Because Getting Shut Down by Congress Wasn’t Humiliating Enough
The government shutdown ran them off last year, locked the gates mid-production like some kind of Kafkaesque joke, but they came back. The Golden Gate’s up there doing its thing, that low thrumming hum of bridge cable and wind and traffic I feel in my chest more than hear. The light comes through these gun ports in shafts, harsh and specific, and I’m trying to chase it with the camera before it moves, as the fog rolls in, before an actor pivots into shadow. Which would be on me this time since I designed the lights for this version of We Players Macbeth at Fort Point.
The witches are probably the best thing about this whole endeavor. They’re not doing costume-shop spooky. They’re something older, something that belongs in these shadows and salt-stained bricks. They move through those brick archways under the Golden Gate like they grew there, like the fort itself conjured them up from 150 years of military paranoia and rust and salt wind. They’re elemental. They’re right.
Ava Roy‘s still directing like someone who actually understands what “site-specific” means, it’s not just cute because there are arches, it’s because the space has its own malevolence, its own geometry of paranoia. These casemates were built to watch for enemies that never came, to fire cannons at threats that materialized mostly in the fevered imagination of 19th-century military contractors. The fort IS the Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Scotland, Denmark, Fort Point, it’s all the same architecture of dread.
But then…Jesus Christ. The music.
It’s like someone recorded a telenovela soundtrack in 1977 on equipment stolen from a condemned high school A/V department, then copied it sixteen times on degrading magnetic tape until it sounded like it was being played through a swimming pool full of sewage by the world’s most earnest thirteen-year-olds who just learned what a crescendo is and plan to abuse the knowledge. It wants SO BADLY to be ominous. It’s trying. You can hear it trying. And that’s somehow worse than if it just sucked with confidence.
But I keep shooting. Because John’s got actual presence as Macbeth, Ava’s doing real work, and those witches are making you believe in prophecy and fate and all the old terrible machinery of tragedy. The music’s a betrayal of everything else that’s working, but the rest of it? The rest of it’s worth the effort of being here, under this bridge, in this cold, chasing light that doesn’t want to be caught.
I Was Here: Saul Bass’s 25-Minute Middle Finger to Mortality
Here’s the thing about Saul Bass’s little twenty-five minute head-fuck Why Man Creates from 1968: it’s the kind of film that makes you realize how completely we’ve commodified and neutered the whole goddamn concept of “being creative” in the decades since.
We’re talking about a guy who made his bones designing title sequences, basically the opening credits that most people use now to check their phones, and he’s out here asking questions that should make every MFA-credentialed content creator want to crawl under their Herman Miller chair and weep. The film concludes that humans create to say “I Am”, a declaration of existence, a middle finger to mortality.
And Bass doesn’t soft-pedal it with inspirational Facebook bullshit. There’s a segment where scientists talk about working for seven years on projects that went absolutely nowhere. Seven years. Not seven weeks of “iterating” or “pivoting” or whatever MBA death-speak we use now to avoid saying “I failed.” These scientists expected results in a few years; decades later, the problems remained unsolved. And Bass doesn’t turn away from that. He leans into it, the failure IS the point, the failure is where the actual human beings live.
The animation sequence at the beginning, this compressed history of human achievement from cave paintings to the atomic age, it moves like thought itself, like the way your brain works at 5:28 AM when you’re chasing something real and either the wine or the coffee are just starting to wear off. It’s got this manic energy that understands creativity isn’t this precious, delicate flower that needs the right “creative space” and a fucking vision board. It’s brutal. It’s chaotic. Socrates drank hemlock. Galileo got tortured. The Wright Brothers could have died face-first in the sand.
And then, and this is where Bass proves he’s not just some starry-eyed romantic, he shows you the conformity. He literally draws people at parties with their skull-tops flipping open to reveal nothing inside. The empty heads of the crowd. The way success calcifies into institution, the way the radical becomes the establishment, the way we take the flag and slap it on everything to make it palatable, make it safe, make it sell.
What kills me, is how prescient Why Man Creates was about our current moment. I mean right fucking now. Bass made this in ’68, when the counterculture still thought it could win, and he’s already showing you the trapdoors, the ways we betray the impulse. The way “creativity” becomes another brand, another department, another thing with metrics and KPIs.
Saul Bass himself admitted he didn’t know what it all meant. That’s the most honest thing anyone’s ever said about making art. You don’t know. You’re not supposed to know. You’re supposed to dive in and flail around and maybe, maybe, if you’re lucky and you don’t give up when it gets hard, and it will get hard, it will get impossible, you’ll pull something out that says to whoever finds it later: I was here. I mattered. I was.
The Mouth Refuses: Billie Whitelaw and the Beautiful Wreckage of Not I
There’s performance and then there’s this thing, this unholy exorcism Billie Whitelaw pulls off where she’s basically a human wound spitting words. Samuel Beckett’s Not I isn’t theatre in any way you’d recognize if you walked in cold. It’s a mouth. Just a fucking mouth hanging in the void, hemorrhaging language at like 200 words per minute, and somewhere behind it is Billie Whitelaw having what amounts to a nervous breakdown eight shows a week.
Beckett rehearsed her into the ground, made her hit these rhythms until they were neurological, not theatrical. And what you get is this sensation that you’re not watching someone act trauma, you’re watching trauma use a human being as a speaker system. The Mouth refuses to say “I”, keeps deflecting to “she”, and that refusal is the whole sick beautiful point. It’s dissociation as art form, the self shattering in real time.
Whitelaw said the piece left her physically and emotionally wrecked, which, yeah, no shit. You can hear it. That jackhammer cadence isn’t virtuosity showing off, it’s someone trying to outrun their own consciousness. The relentlessness is the meaning. Beckett found in her someone willing to disappear completely into the wound, and what comes out is pure, uncut human panic dressed up in poetry. It’s the kind of performance that makes you feel like you’ve witnessed something you shouldn’t have seen – something private, terminal, true.
Macbeth at Fort Point Rehearsal
Speculation: We Players Macbeth Rehearsal at Fort Point…
MACBETH
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
Doctor
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.
Shakespeare, Macbeth, 5,3
Actor Notes: The Fragile Art of Taking Direction
I never said all actors are cattle,
what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle.
Alfred Hitchcock
Here’s the thing about getting notes: it’s the moment where every actor or crews carefully constructed self-mythology gets shredded like wet newspaper. I’m standing there, I’ve just done what I thought was brilliant work, I felt it, really felt it, channeling Brando or whatever dead genius I happened to have communed with on TMC last weekend, and then some director with Altoids and coffee breath leans in and says, “Can you make it less… you know… like that?”
And I have to take it. I have to smile and nod like I’m receiving the goddamn Sermon on the Mount.
The best actors, the ones who aren’t completely huffing their own supply, they know this is the game. They understand that acting is a collaboration, not a séance where you channel your precious instrument through the ether and everyone must bow before your choices. But Christ, the fragile ones, the ones who studied at some overpriced conservatory where they learned to treat every moment like it’s Lear on the heath, they crumble. Or worse, they get defiant. They start explaining their process, as if that matters to anyone but their therapist or their mom.
What you mom hasn’t told you is that notes are how you find out if you’re actually any good or just another narcissist with decent cheekbones. Most people can’t handle that mirror.
Backstage Trio
Backstage Trio: Caroline Parsons, Maria Leigh, and Julie Douglas. The trio of witches in We Players Macbeth on the roof (backstage) at Fort Point, San Francisco.
First Witch: When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
Second Witch: When the hurly-burly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.
Third Witch: That will be ere the set of sun.
First Witch: Where’s the place?
Second Witch: Upon the heath
Third Witch: There to meet with Macbeth.
Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.1
Franconia Performance Salon #10
So here’s what happened at Franconia Performance Salon #10, and going into this one was half an admission of cultural masochism, and the other half a desperate hope that someone, anyone, was going to do something that matters.
Nick Berger’s documentary was the evening’s unexpected grace note. Beautiful, moving, words we throw around until they mean nothing, except when they actually apply. This applied. Nick understands something fundamental: that art worth a damn has to hurt a little, has to reach inside and rearrange your furniture without asking permission.
Ryan and Raegan dragging taxidermy and long underwear into the living room, I mean, what are you even supposed to do with that information? But that’s the point, isn’t it? They’re operating on instinct, on some frequency the rest of us can’t quite tune into. You don’t have to understand it. You just have to respect that they committed. They showed up with dead things and thermal wear and made a choice.
The Brilliant sisters, though. Nathalie wrapping Breille in cellophane while a room full of adults suddenly forgets how to breathe normally. That’s theater. That’s understanding that eroticism isn’t about sex, it’s about attention, control, the voyeuristic contract we pretend we’re not signing. Of course it held everyone’s attention. We’re all just sophisticated primates staring at fire.
The O’Keefe play reading? Sometimes the kindest thing you can do is know when you’ve overstayed your welcome. They didn’t.
Franconia Performance Salon #10
Ryan Tacata and Nathalie Brilliant sharing new performance works; Nicholas Berger presented an excerpt from “Land of Songs,” a new film documentary about Lithuanian folk music; and Kimberly Jannarone directed a section of an unproduced play by Jon O’Keefe, “Saying Emily”.