Sophocles Sinon at Emeryville Mudflats

Here’s what happened: 8:01 p.m., May 4th, 2015, and we’re standing in the Emeryville Mudflats, that beautiful nowhere between Oakland and the Bay Bridge, performing what’s left of Sophocles Sinon. And when I say “what’s left,” I mean four words. Four fucking words that survived 2,400 years while empires rose and burned and we landed on the moon and invented the internet and forgot how to look each other in the eye.

This is part of IOTA, this mad, gorgeous project to resurrect the ghost plays, the lost tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The fragments. The scattered DNA of stories that once made grown men weep in stone amphitheaters.

It’s 52 degrees, partly cloudy, that Bay Area twilight that makes everything feel like you’re living inside a photograph that’s already starting to fade. Fourteen people showed up. The performance lasted three minutes and forty seconds. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

The Fragments

But here’s what those four words carried: Sinon, the original con man, the prototype for every lying bastard who ever smiled while twisting the knife. The Greeks left him behind as bait. He claimed kinship with Palamedes, you know, the guy his own side sacrificed, and he sold the Trojans on the greatest marketing campaign in Western civilization: that wooden horse was just a little gift for Athena, nothing to worry about, definitely don’t destroy it or the goddess will make you sorry. But bring it inside your walls? Man, then Troy’s going to own Greece forever. Victory guaranteed.

They bought it. They wheeled doom right through their own gates because one smooth-talking survivor knew exactly which buttons to push.

Four words. Three minutes and forty seconds. Fourteen witnesses. One bridge overhead. And somewhere in that cold mud, something ancient breathed again.

The Location…
Early 1960s, the Emeryville Mudflats became this fever dream of American refuse transfigured into art. Somebody, or a bunch of somebodies who understood that trash and beauty aren’t opposites but siblings, started building monuments out of what the tide brought in and what we threw away.

Medfly Man waving from his throne like a demented king. Heffalumps. Prima ballerinas pirouetting in place forever. The Driftwood Five, a band made of ocean garbage, frozen mid-song. A full-size train going nowhere. The Red Baron and the Sopwith Camel locked in eternal combat above the mud. A Viking the size of a house. An Egyptian canoe with a boy mummy at the helm and a gold casket lashed to the deck, because why the hell not?

When I was a kid in Berkeley, my mom would drive my brother and me out there to play. We’d climb those driftwood sculptures like they were our personal jungle gym, splinters and salt air and the smell of rot and creation all mixed together. It was ours. It belonged to everyone and no one. You could touch it, crawl inside it, become part of somebody else’s vision without asking permission.

And the whole time, while these insane sculptures multiplied like some kind of beautiful virus, 90 species of birds, clapper rails, barn swallows, black phoebes, just kept living their lives around it all. They didn’t care about the art or the statement. They had their own concerns.

Then 1998 rolled around and Caltrans decided enough was enough. Eighty Dumpsters. They brought in a helicopter, a helicopter, to scrape it all away. Plastic bottles, glass, foam, rotting railroad ties soaked in creosote, utility poles, shopping carts still dreaming of supermarket aisles. Art, trash, whatever you want to call it when something means something to somebody.

Today? Gone. All of it. Maybe you’ll spot a rogue piece if you’re lucky, some stubborn survivor clinging to existence. But mostly it’s just driftwood and trash washing up like it always did, like it always will, waiting for someone to see it as something more than what it is.