Ava
Roy Artistic Director, We Players

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 conceived it, directed it, starred in it, sewed the costumes, probably even 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.

She’ll gently correct you if you call it “site-specific.” I agree, that term is too small for what she does, too easy, the kind of phrase that gets slapped on any play performed outside a proscenium. You cannot pick up a We Players’ Macbeth and set it down somewhere else. It was built into Fort Point the way barnacles are built into a pier, pry it loose and you’ve destroyed the thing. Weeks before anyone else shows up to a site, she’s already there. Walking the place. Sitting in it. Listening. Sometimes she brings someone, sometimes she doesn’t, but the listening is hers alone.  Ava’s the one who decides what the place is trying to say.  What the light does at four in the afternoon versus seven. Where people naturally walk, where they stop. What phase the moon will be in on opening night.  She works as if the stones remember things, as if the dirt holds something, and her job is not to impose a production on top of all that history but to honor what’s already there. The space is the first collaborator. Everyone else, including the playwright, even if it’s Shakespeare, shows up second.

And then there’s the weather, the tides, the foghorn that won’t shut up. Most directors would fight all of it. Ava folds it in. That foghorn at Fort Point isn’t an interruption to the score, it is the score. The Macbeth she built there begins in daylight and gets eaten by darkness in real time, the actual sunset doing the psychological work alongside the actors, the play descending into night because night is descending on the play. Nature isn’t an obstacle to manage around. Nature is in the cast. The fog gets billing.

This is where the teacher in her shows up. Because she’s not just letting the world bleed into the work for atmosphere, she’s framing it, pointing at it, making the audience notice. The hope, the whole bet, is that if she can get you to attend to the way light shifts across stone for two hours on a Saturday, you might walk out and keep doing it on Sunday. On Monday. That the attention itself is portable, even if the production isn’t. That’s the longer game underneath the spectacle.

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.

We’ve shared stages and sites, the close work and the fallings-out, the silences that go on for years and then break like nothing happened. Call it friendship if you want. I’d call it a shared disease, mutual obsession, two people who caught the same thing young and never bothered looking for a cure. And Ava is still out there. Still hauling audiences up mountains. Still putting them on boats. Still marching them into abandoned military installations like she’s smuggling them across some border the rest of the theatre world doesn’t even know exists. Still insisting: confidently, loud, unreasonable, and absolutely right…

that theatre belongs everywhere except the one goddamn place it’s supposed to.