July 10th, 2016. 1:08 in the afternoon. Pillar Point. Seventy-two degrees, California sun beating down, the beach looking out at Mavericks, that legendary, bone-crushing surf break where waves rise up like mountains and gods go to die, and we’re about to do something beautifully, almost stupidly ambitious: perform what’s left of a play that’s been dead for two and a half thousand years.
Two fragments. That’s it. That’s all that survived from Sophocles’ Nausicaa. Just two lines:
You know the story, or at least Homer’s version. Princess Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous and Queen Arete of Phaeacia, out doing laundry with her girls on the beach. Shipwrecked Odysseus washes up on shore, naked, half-drowned, covered in salt and desperation. She doesn’t run. She gives him clothes, food, directions to her father’s palace. She saves his ass. Pure, helpful innocence meeting a man touched by gods and cursed by fate. Hospitality as salvation. A pivotal moment, without her, there’s no journey home to Ithaca.
Sophocles saw that scene and thought: there’s a play in there. He wrote Nausicaa (some call it Plyntria aka The Washerwomen), a full tragedy built around that encounter, exploring hospitality, appearance versus reality, the collision of the heroic and the human. And here’s something: according to Athenaeus (ancient Greek rhetorician and grammarian), Sophocles himself played the part of Nausicaa. The great tragedian in drag, playing the princess.
The play is gone. Lost to time like so many others. What remains are those two fragments, echoes of something larger.
This site specific performance, 65 minutes, 47 people watching, is part of IOTA, a mad, necessary project to resurrect the fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. To give voice to the ghosts. To stand on a beach and speak what little survived into the salt air and see what happens.
That’s what we did at Pillar Point that Sunday afternoon, with Mavericks at our feet.
The Fragments…
…to weave robes and tunics made of linen…
The wave passed me by
then slowly sucked me back
Location…
Long before any of this, the surfers, the bootleggers, the Spanish missionaries with their crosses and their certainties, this was Ohlone land.
The Ohlone told stories. Sacred narratives that weren’t just entertainment; they were instruction manuals for how to be human. Coyote, the trickster, clever, wily, lustful, greedy, deeply irresponsible. Everything we are and shouldn’t be. He’d compete with Hummingbird, who despite being tiny, regularly handed Coyote his ass. There was Eagle too, watching from above.
In the beginning, according to Ohlone creation stories, the world was nothing but water except for one peak: Mount Diablo. Coyote, Hummingbird, and Eagle stood on it, looking out at everything and nothing. Humans? We’re descended from Coyote. Which explains a lot, actually.
Then the Europeans showed up.
October 28-29, 1769. The Spanish Portolá expedition rolled through, heading north. Franciscan missionary Juan Crespí took notes. Lots of geese here, he wrote, so the soldiers called it the plain of Los Ansares. He described the rocks jutting out like “two thick Farallones of an irregular and pointed shape.” Pretty, sure. Historic, absolutely.
Also the beginning of the end.
By the time Mission Dolores was founded in 1776, the land was being used for grazing mission livestock. The Ohlone? Reduced to less than ten percent of their original population. Genocided by disease, forced labor, and the tender mercies of Christianity.
After the missions were secularized in 1834, the land got carved up into ranchos. This area became Rancho Corral de Tierra, “earthen corral”, granted in 1839 to Francisco Guerrero by Governor Pro-Tem Manuel Jimeno. Guerrero got murdered in San Francisco by some guy named Francis LeBras in 1851.
They buried him at Mission Dolores cemetery.
Guerrero Street in San Francisco is named after him, which is something, I guess.
October 17th, 1876. The three-masted Welsh ship Rydal Hall crashes in the fog right off this beach. Nine men die. The cargo, a total loss. The ship just sits there on the rocks for almost a month, broken, bleeding tons of coal into the water and onto the sand before finally cracking apart. Salvage? Have you seen the waves? Impossible.
Fast forward to the 1920s. Prohibition. The beach becomes a bootlegger’s paradise. Rum ships offshore, unloading millions of dollars’ worth of illegal booze under the stars.
World War II rolls around, and the army sets up shop here to protect against Japanese invasion and bombing raids that never come.
Then, early March 1967. Three surfers, Alex Matienzo, Jim Thompson, and Dick Knottmeyer, paddle out. Matienzo’s roommate’s white-haired German Shepherd comes along. The dog swims out to them, which is sweet but dangerous, so Matienzo ties him up on shore. They surf overhead peaks about a quarter mile out, eyeing the bigger outside waves and deciding they’re too suicidal even for them.
They named the spot after the dog.
Collaborators…
Jamie Lyons (concept and direction)
Aleta Hayes (choreography and Artistic Director of The Chocolate Heads)
Timothy Lee (Poseidon)
Arthur Jongebloed (Athena)
Benjamin Cohn (Odysseus)
Judy Syrkin-Nikolau (Nausicaä)
Amber Levine (Maiden/Cyclops)
with…
Angrette McCloskey (design) and Jamie Freebury (narrator)