We Players aren’t really doing theatre, they’re fucking hijacking geography. They take Fort Point, that hulking Civil War relic squatting beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, and turn it into a place where Macbeth’s witches aren’t performing at you. They’re bleeding through the walls, through the fog, through the salt-corroded iron that’s been holding up the bridge’s southern tower since before your grandparents were born. You walk into that space and suddenly Shakespeare isn’t some academic exercise in iambic pentameter; it’s visceral, it’s immediate, it’s real in ways that should be impossible for 400 year old words.
My photographs of their work captures something essential about what happens when performance stops apologizing for existing and starts demanding that the world bend to its will. Romeo and Juliet at Petaluma Adobe, King Lear at Rodeo Beach in the Marin Headlands, that Trio Happening at Aquatic Park: this isn’t site specific theatre in the precious, MFA workshop sense. This is theatre that understands place has its own narrative gravity, its own ghosts, its own electromagnetic field that pulls meaning into new configurations.
In these photographs I refuses the obvious seductions. I’m not going for the money shot: the actor backlit against the Pacific, the dramatic gesture against weathered stone or under a canopy of trees. I’m after something trickier: the moment when performer, text, and landscape achieve some kind of unholy synthesis, when I can’t tell where the acting ends and the environment begins. That’s the real innovation here. That’s what makes this work matter.
We Players gets it. They understand that the National Parks Service sites they colonize aren’t neutral containers but active collaborators, sometimes hostile ones. Performing a version of King Lear in the Headlands means negotiating with wind that can drown out dialogue, with cold that makes your hands shake, with light that refuses to cooperate. Shakespeare never had to compete with Nike missile sirens or tour buses disgorging confused retirees who suddenly find themselves in the middle of Act III.
Our work together documents this beautiful, chaotic collision between high art ambition and the brute fact of place: the way Fort Point’s casemates amplify sound into something primal, the way Aquatic Park’s industrial maritime bones refuse to be picturesque.
This is performance that respects its audience enough to make them uncomfortable, to make them walk a mile in questionable shoes, to make them stand in the cold while Lear howls at a storm that isn’t simulated. It’s democratic in the truest sense: not dumbed down, not accessible through compromise, but open to anyone willing to meet it on its own unforgiving terms. That’s the compact We Players makes, and that’s what this documentation captures: the moment when art stops being polite and starts being necessary.
