There’s something profoundly obscene about doing Shakespeare on a beach at sunset: the kind of obscenity that matters, that cuts through all the bullshit civic theater platitudes and Merchant Ivory decorum. This isn’t some genteel interpretation where the Bard gets neutered by velvet curtains and good intentions. This is two bodies against geological time, human frailty staged against a landscape that gives exactly zero fucks about pentameter or the RSC’s production history.
Rodeo Beach doesn’t give you anything for free. The Marin Headlands are raw, indifferent geology: military ruins and wind-stripped cypress, the Pacific hammering away at volcanic rock like it’s got a grudge and eternity to prosecute it. It’s the kind of place that makes you feel your own temporary condition, and that’s exactly where Lear needs to happen. Not in some climate-controlled box where we can pretend tragedy is an intellectual exercise.
Ava Roy (We Players) and John Hadden (Hubbard Hall) out there at the edge of the continent, working through the cage speech (“We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage”) while the actual birds wheel overhead, probably laughing at the presumptuousness of it all. The irony isn’t lost. Here’s Lear talking about prison while standing in the most liberating expanse of sand and tide you can imagine, except the liberation is terrifying because it offers no shelter, no mercy, just elemental honesty.
The light out there at that hour doesn’t apologize. It’s got that quality of imminent withdrawal, the day packing its bags and heading out, leaving everything exposed in amber brutal clarity. Every gesture, every crack in the voice gets amplified. There’s nowhere to hide when you’re backlit by the dying sun with the ocean doing its infinite thing behind you.
What makes this work (what saves it from being pretentious site specific theater wankery) is the fundamental violence of the match. Shakespeare wrote about power and dispossession, about the stripping away of everything we think protects us from the void. The Headlands are already doing that work, have been doing it for millennia. The coastline doesn’t care about your title, your legacy, your carefully constructed identity. It just erodes.
And sunset’s the perfect cruelty for it. That golden hour everyone Instagram-orgasms over? That’s death light, friends. That’s the visible spectrum of ending. Ava and John standing in it, working through the reconciliation between father and daughter, between the powerful and the powerless, between what we were and what we’ve become: it’s almost too perfect, which is probably why it actually works.
The thing about Shakespeare on a beach is it forces the question: who’s performing for whom? Are Ava and John performing Lear, or is the Pacific performing its own eternal tragedy, and these two humans just happen to be momentarily visible against its vastness? The cage isn’t just metaphor out there: it’s the fragile span between birth and death, consciousness flickering briefly against the infinite dark.
Human drama, meet geological indifference.