Slacker’s Hill, Marin Headlands: some places just earn their names through the accumulated weight of bodies showing up, doing nothing in particular, letting the view do all the work. But at sunrise, with Muriel Maffre and Ryan Tacata running Euripides fragment #91 on this windswept chunk of rock above the Golden Gate, the irony burns clean off.
This is theater stripped to its original brutality, no wings, no fourth wall, just actors and air and the Pacific Ocean deciding whether it gives a damn about your emotional arc. Fragment #91 isn’t even a complete play, just shards of something that mattered enough 2,400 years ago that someone bothered to save the pieces. And here’s Muriel cutting through the morning fog like she’s trying to wake the dead, or maybe just wake San Francisco across the water, that sleeping beast of a city pretending it doesn’t see us up here, pretending it doesn’t matter.
The thing about site-specific work is it’s either completely alive or it’s graduate school masturbation. There’s no middle ground. The Headlands don’t care about your PhD or your Stanislavski. The wind will steal your lines, the fog will swallow your blocking, and that bridge, that perfect, arrogant bridge, will upstage us every single time unless we’re brave enough to collaborate with it instead of against it.
That’s what makes this work. Not despite the location, but because of it.