I met Ava when I cast her in Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language and we worked together throughout my time at Stanford: Marat/Sade, Revenger’s Tragedy. Ava was already doing that thing she does, that refusal to accept theatre as something that happens in safe little boxes with comfortable seats. She started We Players in the Spring of 2000 with a Romeo and Juliet across Stanford’s campus. She directed it, starred in it, made the costumes, probably swept the fucking quad afterwards. Maximum ambition, minimum budget, the way all good things start. She built something from nothing, this vision of theatre that treated landscape like a collaborator, that understood architecture could be as powerful as any actor.
Sometimes you’re in the room together, sometimes you’re not. Sometimes years pass. But for me there’s a thread that runs through: respect, recognition, the understanding that we’re both committed to the same kind of uncompromising work. That shared conviction that theatre belongs anywhere except in a traditional theatre. And sailing. That particular madness of trusting yourself to wind and water and a vessel that demands constant attention. My boat Rocinante became another stage, another unconventional space where Shakespeare’s sonnets could breathe salt air. To me it makes sense. Sailing and site-specific theatre share the same DNA, you can’t phone it in, you can’t fake it, nature doesn’t give a shit about your plans.
The productions of hers I’ve worked on and photographed: Macbeth at Fort Point, King Fool in the Marin Headlands, a photo shoot for King Lear on wind-ravaged Rodeo Beach, they’re not just shows. They’re endurance tests. For performers, for audiences, for the very idea of what theatre can be. Ava makes work that demands everything, that asks you to climb hills and brave wind and cold and question why you ever thought art was supposed to be comfortable.
The world needs work that challenges, that transforms, that refuses to apologize for being difficult or demanding or impossible. Ava embodies that. She’s built a life and a company around the idea that if theatre isn’t risking something, it’s not worth doing.
We’ve shared stages and sites, arguments and triumphs, the particular kind of relationship that exists on mutual artistic obsession rather than regular contact. She’s still out there, dragging audiences up mountains and onto boats and into abandoned military installations. Still insisting that theatre belongs everywhere except where it’s safe.
The years thunder by.
The dreams of youth grow dim
where they lie
caked in dust on the shelves of patience.
Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.
Where, then lies the answer?
In choice.
Which shall it be:
Bankruptcy of Purse
or Bankruptcy of Life?
Sterling Hayden