The Fragment
he blows no longer on small pipes,
but with savage blasts,
without a mouthpiece.
Three lines of Sophocles, three lousy lines that survived when 96 percent of his work got swallowed by time. This fragment doesn’t want to be understood. It wants to be encountered.
So I picked the Wave Organ, this broken-ass sculpture built from cemetery stones and PVC pipes that barely works half the time. Peter Richards and George Gonzales built it in ’86, back when the Exploratorium still had some weird juice to it, and it sits out there on the Marina jetty gurgles and wheezes when the bay feels like cooperating. Most days tourists lean into those pipes expecting some grand aquatic symphony and get maybe a burp, maybe nothing. The place is a monument to noble failure, to ambition that got 70 percent of the way there and then shrugged.
Perfect. That’s where you stage Sophocles Fragment 116.
Because here’s what I had to work with: “he blows no longer on small pipes, but with savage blasts, without a mouthpiece.” That’s it. That’s the whole text. No context, no character name, no stage directions, just this image of someone or something abandoning refinement for rawness, technique for howling. The civilized pastoral pipe for the unmediated blast.
I brought in Lauren Dietrich Chavez because if anyone understands what it means to move without a mouthpiece, without mediation, without the protective distance of technique, it’s her. I brought in Derek Phillips to layer sound onto a location that’s already all about sound, or the promise of sound, or the gorgeous failure of sound to show up when you need it. Dylan Johnson made costumes that had to work against wind and salt spray and the basic inhospitality of concrete and water. We weren’t creating a production. We were making an event that could collapse into absurdity at any second, and that possibility of failure was essential.
You rehearse at a place like the Wave Organ and you learn real quick that you can’t control a goddamn thing. The tide comes in when it wants. The pipes gurgle or they don’t. Joggers pass by. Dogs bark. The bay refuses to be a cooperative partner in your theatrical vision. And that’s the point: the fragment itself is about abandoning control, about the savage blast that doesn’t give a damn about our carefully constructed harmonies.
Lauren moved through these improvised sequences while Derek added layers that competed with the wind and the slap of water against stone. The whole thing lasts maybe fifteen, twenty minutes. Then it’s over. Done. Joggers keep jogging, and the Wave Organ goes back to its usual business of mostly not working while the bay does whatever the bay does.
We’ve taken this fragment that barely survived 2,400 years, matched it with a sculpture that barely survives the tides and the salt air, and somehow in all that precariousness and fragility and likely failure, we’d honored what the fragment was actually about. The savage blast. The rejection of refinement. The howl without mediation.
I staged it where the architecture itself is fragmentary, cobbled together from tombstones (literal gravestones from Laurel Hill that got bulldozed to make room for condos) and I let the whole enterprise be haunted and half-ruined and honest about its own limitations. I don’t pretend I’m resurrecting Sophocles. I’m not. I’m trying to make something new out of the scraps, something that’ll disappear just like the original disappeared, and maybe, if I’m lucky, if the wind’s right, someone in the audience will catch a glimpse of what the ancient blast might’ve sounded like before it got civilized into scholarship and footnotes.
Making something that acknowledges it’s already half-gone even while I’m making it. No mouthpiece. Just the blast.
This is part of IOTA, this sprawling, maybe impossible mission to resurrect the ghost plays. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, the stuff that got lost, burned, forgotten, buried under two millennia of Mediterranean dust. We’re dragging these fragments back into the light, making them breathe again, making them mean something in spaces that don’t give a damn about the fourth wall or subscriber audiences or any of that institutional bullshit.