Sutro Baths broken concrete pools don’t give a shit about me or my romanticized notion of Victorian grandeur. They just are, salt-scarred, graffitied, filled with seawater and broken glass and the honest stink of kelp and bird shit rotting in the sun. And that’s exactly why Sophocles Phaedra belongs here.
Sophocles understood something we keep forgetting: tragedy isn’t about villains. It’s about people making terrible decisions in terrible moments because panic short-circuits everything we think about being human. Phaedra, not some lascivious foreign bitch but a mother trying to protect her kids when she thinks her husband is dead, reads the room wrong, Hippolytus reads her wrong, and suddenly everybody’s drowning in their own misunderstanding. Nobody’s evil. Everybody’s fucked.
To stage these fragments in some pristine proscenium theater with perfect acoustics and comfortable seats? Please. That’s for plays where things make sense, where motivations are clear, where the architecture itself promises resolution.
But here, these ruins… These pools that were built to hold something civilized and now hold nothing but Pacific chaos twice a day. The tide comes, it goes out. And what was built to contain it? Just ghosts and geometry.
That’s the frame for Phaedra’s panic. That moment when she realizes Theseus isn’t dead, that her political proposal to Hippolytus can be misread as sexual, that she’s trapped, that’s the tide coming in. And her accusation, that desperate lie to save herself that destroys everyone? That’s not wickedness. That’s someone drowning in real time. That’s the human animal thrashing, making it worse, making it deadly.
That late afternoon light coming in low off the Pacific, raking across the broken concrete at angles that turn every crack into a shadow, every pool into a mirror of sky and violence. This isn’t romantic. This is forensic. The light at Sutro doesn’t flatter, it reveals. Every flaw, every mistake in judgment, every place where structure failed and gave way to entropy.
The golden hour at the edge of the continent is not gentle. It’s desperate. It’s the sun clawing its way toward the horizon while the fog bank waits offshore like patient dread. That’s when Phaedra makes her proposal to Hippolytus. That’s when the light makes everything look possible for exactly twenty minutes before it all goes dark.
The fog is a chorus. Not metaphorically, literally. It’s Sophocles‘ web of misunderstanding made physical. Actors vanish into it. Voices come from the wrong directions. Hippolytus hears accusation where Phaedra meant alliance because the fog eats context, leaves only tone, only fear.
The ruins are Theseus. Not a character walking around, the whole damn structure is him. Solid. Imposing. Built to contain the chaos of the ocean and utterly failing at it. Those seven pools at different levels, connected by channels that don’t connect anymore? That’s his empire, his legacy, his family, all compartmentalized, all supposedly controlled, all collapsing into each other as the tide comes in.
Phaedra starts on the upper tier, the one closest to the road, the parking lot, the civilized world of traffic and tourists. That’s Athens. That’s the throne she’s trying to protect for her children. It’s also the least interesting part of the ruins, and that’s perfect. Political power is boring. Safety is boring.
Hippolytus I imagine lives in the lowest pools, the ones that flood first, the ones nearest the cave mouths where seals sometimes haul out and cormorants nest in the cliff face. He’s not civilized. He’s not political. He’s at home with the edge, with the wild, with things that bite. When Phaedra descends to meet him, every step down is a step away from control, from calculation, from the lie she’ll eventually tell.
The site isn’t neutral. It’s not a black box waiting for a vision. It’s got its own weather, its own tides, its own structural decay happening in real time. It’ll upstage actors. It’ll ruin blocking. And if I’m doing this right, I’ll let it. Because Phaedra isn’t a play about people controlling their circumstances. It’s about circumstances obliterating people who thought they had a plan.
The fragments Sophocles left us are enough. More than enough. Because the real tragedy was always in the gaps anyway, in what isn’t said, what can’t be taken back, what the ocean and time have eroded to its essential truth:
We’re all just trying to survive. And we’re all terrible at it. And the ruins we leave behind don’t judge us for that.
They just stand there, filling and emptying, filling and emptying, waiting for the next incoming tide.