I’ve seen Greek tragedy done in every godforsaken venue from The Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus to prosceniums that smell like 1950s cigarettes to black box theaters where you can hear the toilet flush from the dressing room, but there’s something absolutely primal, something that cuts through all the academic horseshit, about staging Sophocles in a chapel at Fort Mason. We’re taking this ancient story about a guy who literally can’t outrun destiny, and we’re jamming it into this liminal space between the sacred and the profane, between military history and contemporary art practice…. and that’s where the good stuff lives.
The thing about Anthony Burgess’ adaptation is that it doesn’t fuck around with false reverence. It’s got teeth. It knows that tragedy isn’t about feeling sorry for some ancient king. It’s about recognizing your own face in the wreckage. I sit in that chapel, those walls that have witnessed God knows how many confessions and prayers and desperate bargains with the universe, and I watch Oedipus realize he’s been sleeping with his mother, killed his father, and I think: Christ, we’re all just fumbling around in the dark, aren’t we? We’re all so goddamn sure we’re the heroes of our own stories until the moment we realize we’ve been the monster all along.
Fort Mason itself is this beautiful ruin, this ghost of military infrastructure reanimated as art space, which is maybe the most San Francisco thing imaginable. And here I am with Natty Justiniano, Tonyana Borkovi, Aleta Hayes, Muriel Maffre, all of them) doing what good theater does: making something ancient feel like a knife against your throat right now, in this moment, making the 2,500-year-old text breathe with contemporary urgency.
You want catharsis? This is how you get catharsis.
thank you Muriel Maffre, John Warren Travis, Nathaniel Justiniano, Tonyanna Borkovi, Aleta Hayes, Val Sinckler, Benjamin Cohn, Daniel Guaqueta, Amber Levine, Timothy Lee, Son Nguyen, Yula Montoya, Kellen Hoxworth, Becky Chaleff, Jeff Schwartz, San Francisco International Arts Festival, Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, and Museum of Performance + Design