Sutro Baths, these magnificent corpse pits of concrete and rebar where the Pacific chews on what’s left of a San Francisco Belle Époque dream. And there, in the ruins, someone’s staging a reading of Titus Andronicus. That play. The one that makes Hamlet look like a fucking therapy session.
Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,
Blood and revenge are hammering in my head
William Shakespeare Titus Andronicus, 2.3
This might be the only place this play should ever be performed. Here. In the bones of something that used to matter, that used to be grand, that the ocean is slowly reclaiming like an eviction notice written in salt.
Because Titus is the play Shakespeare wrote before he learned to lie to us prettily. Before he figured out how to make murder look like poetry, how to make revenge look like justice. This is the ur-text, twenty-four years old and full of pure uncut rage, bodies piling up like a Jacobean snuff film, and everyone’s eating everyone else’s children. There’s no redemption here. No catharsis. Just blood and more blood until the stage is a fucking abattoir.
And you put that there? In those ruins? Where Sutro’s vision of Democratic Bathing for the Masses, seven pools, glass ceilings, tropical plants, the whole utopian nightmare, burned down in ’66 and nobody bothered to rebuild it because by then the dream was already dead anyway?