Tagged — Jamie Lyons
Battery Wallace is a concrete ruin. Military architecture built for a war that moved on without it, left to the fog and the coyote brush and the particular silence that only abandoned places know how to hold. It is not a theatre. That's the point. The moment John Hadden opens his mouth and Lear's madness comes spilling out against that crumbling backdrop, you realize that every proscenium stage you've ever sat in front of was a kind of lie. A comfortable, padded, well lit lie.
This is the thing most people in the arts won't say out loud: safety is the enemy of the real. The institutional machinery, the grants committees, the nice programs printed on card stock, all of it exists to file down the edges of something that should cut you. King Fool cut. It took the oldest, most performed, most academically suffocated text in the English language and dragged it out into the weather where it could breathe again and do damage.
What happened at Battery Wallace wasn't a production. It was a confrontation. With the text, with the landscape, with whatever you thought you knew about what performance is supposed to be. Dying is not romantic. Art shouldn't be either. It should cost you something. Out here, it did.
Speculation 2015
It should feel ridiculous. People howling Shakespeare at the Pacific wind inside concrete walls built to kill other people, it’s the kind of high-concept art project that makes regular humans roll their eyes so hard they can see their own brain stems. But it doesn’t feel ridiculous. It feels necessary. Dying is not romantic, and […]
ReadCollusion 2014
Collaboration: three people trying to figure out how to make Shakespeare’s storm feel real when the actual wind off the Pacific is already doing half the work. We’re not building a set. We’re negotiating with architecture that predates us and will outlast us, trying to figure out where bodies should stand, how voices will […]
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Speculation 2014
We Players Lear Rehearsal at Battery Wallace in the Marin Headlands Doth any here know me? This is not Lear: Doth Lear walk thus? speak thus? Where are his eyes? Either his notion weakens, his discernings Are lethargied–Ha! waking? ’tis not so. Who is it that can tell me who I am? Shakespeare, King Lear, […]
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