Tagged — Jamie Lyons
On Site-Specific Shakespeare
A lot of people pretend that just because you drag something out of a theater and slap it against a concrete bunker or a beach at sunset, you've somehow reinvented the wheel. But this? This is different. This is people who actually understand that Shakespeare wasn't writing for climate-controlled auditoriums with assigned seating and wine at intermission. He was writing for people who'd throw rotten vegetables at you if you bored them.
Fort Point. Battery Wallace. Sutro Baths. Sailboats. These aren't venues, they're accomplices. The fog rolls in during Lear and suddenly you realize the Bard probably would've sold his second-best bed for this kind of atmospheric ambiguity. Nature doesn't give a shit about your blocking, and that's precisely the point.
The Ruins Speak
There's something honest about performing in places that are already falling apart. No pretense. No gilt edges. Just the actual bones of human construction meeting the actual bones of human language. When Ava Roy screams into the wind at Battery Wallace in the Marin Headlands, she's not performing against nature, she's finally letting the text do what it was always supposed to do: confront the void without a safety net.
These aren't production photos, they're evidence. Proof that someone understood you can't domesticate these plays any more than you can domesticate a storm. Shakespeare in ruins, Shakespeare in graveyards, Shakespeare where the Pacific pounds against what's left of Sutro's dream, this is theatre stripped down to its essential violence and beauty.
On Authenticity
Everyone wants to tell you what's "authentic." Usually while charging you forty-five dollars for the privilege. But authenticity isn't about period-accurate codpieces or hitting every iamb like you're afraid the ghost of your high school English teacher is taking notes. Authenticity is about stakes. About remembering these weren't museum pieces when they were written, they were arguments about what it means to be human, delivered by people who were probably drunk and certainly not interested in your reverent silence.
Site-specific work, when it's done right, and not just as a gimmick to justify not renting an actual theater, forces everyone to remember that Shakespeare's language was meant to compete with life itself. With weather. With interruption. With the real world pressing in on all sides. It's confrontational. It demands your attention not because some usher told you to turn off your phone, but because if you look away you might actually miss something that matters.
Why It Matters (Or Doesn't)
None of this matters. Not really. Shakespeare's been dead for four hundred years. The Sutro Baths are gone. Fort Point is maintained by the government, or so they tell us. We're all going to die and be forgotten and eventually someone will be performing Hamlet on the ruins of whatever's left of San Francisco while what’s left of marine life reclaims the whole coastline.
But, and this is crucial, while we're here, while we have language and lungs and the stupidity to stand on windswept batteries screaming poetry into the gathering dark, we might as well commit. We might as well make it real. We might as well acknowledge that Shakespeare wrote these plays about mortality and power and love and betrayal not because he thought they'd end up in classrooms, but because he knew, like we all know if we're honest, that this is all we get. This moment. This performance. This ridiculous, beautiful attempt to mean something before we’re dust.
So yeah, do it in the ruins. Do it where the ocean can drown out half your lines. Do it where the wind makes the costumes look less like costumes and more like the actual rags of human pretension flapping against the cosmic indifference. Do it anywhere except the safe, controlled spaces where art goes to be appreciated rather than experienced.
That's not theory. That's survival.
FalseArt 2023
So What the Hell IS Real Anyway? Maybe the text is just sitting there like last week’s corpse… cold, rigid, embalmed in academic formaldehyde, while the actor’s body is out there in the trenches, sweating through the shirt, bleeding into the floorboards, happening in real time like a Mahler Symphony you can feel in your […]
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FalseArt 2023
The spectacle Joseph Beuys pulled off in Frankfurt was pure, uncut confrontation dressed up in mystical horseshit, and that’s exactly why it mattered. You walk into that theater in ’69, Europe’s still got the psychic stench of the war clinging to everything like cigarette smoke in an underground bar, and there’s this German shaman motherfucker […]
ReadFalseArt 2023
There’s something beautifully, recklessly insane about dragging potted trees across America so you can stage Lear in someone’s backyard. It’s the kind of mad devotion that makes you wonder if Ben Greet wasn’t just performing Shakespeare but embodying the whole gorgeous, doomed enterprise of art itself. Think about it: here’s this Brit at the turn […]
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Collusion 2016
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2016
my father Charles R. Lyons in Shakespeare’s Love Labour’s Lost for Farm Players at Stanford University mid 1960s LOOK AT THIS MAGNIFICENT BASTARD. Stanford University, mid 1960s, some production of Love’s Labour’s Lost that probably nobody remembers except it’s Shakespeare and Shakespeare MATTERS because Shakespeare understood that language is the only weapon we’ve got against […]
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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 […]
ReadEngineering 2015
Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes, A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life; Whose misadventured piteous overthrows, Doth with their death bury their […]
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Speculation 2015
Sutro Baths, these magnificent corpse pits of concrete and rebar where the Pacific chews on what’s left of a San Francisco Belle Époque dream. And there, in the ruins, someone’s staging a reading of Titus Andronicus. That play. The one that makes Hamlet look like a fucking therapy session. Vengeance is in my heart, death […]
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Collusion 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
The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier than they had been in life. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Truth? About getting to the marrow of what Shakespeare actually meant? Then get your ass out of those antiseptic black box […]
ReadSpeculation 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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Speculation 2014
Speculation: Backstage We Players Macbeth at Fort Point, 2014 Backstage We Players Macbeth at Fort Point So always avoid banality. That is, avoid illustrating the author’s words and remarks. If you want to create a true masterpiece you must always avoid beautiful lies: the truths on the calender under each date you find a proverb […]
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Industries 2014
The government shutdown ran them off last year, locked the gates mid production like some kind of Kafkaesque joke, but they came back. The Golden Gate’s up there doing its thing, that low thrumming hum of bridge cable and wind and traffic I feel in my chest more than hear. The light comes through these […]
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Speculation 2014
Speculation: We Players Macbeth Rehearsal at Fort Point… MACBETH Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart? Doctor Therein the patient […]
ReadIndustries 2014
Looking at the Fool in Lear is like staring into a cracked mirror at 1:34 AM with bourbon on your breath and truth seeping through the fissures. This isn’t some jingling court jester doing pratfalls for the Renaissance crowd, this is the guy who sees the wreckage before the crash, who speaks in riddles because […]
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FalseArt 2013
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Hamlet Arnold doing “To be or not to be” with a cigar clenched in his teeth and a .44 in his hand is the most honest fucking Shakespeare you’re ever going to see. You want purity? You want authenticity? Go watch some Yale Drama School graduate emote at you for three hours. What […]
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The City 2013
This whole intelligent design hustle, this super natural con job, it’s the kind of beautiful lie that only works if you never actually open your eyes and look at what’s sitting right in front of you. These witches want you to believe that some all powerful, all knowing force had infinite time and infinite juice […]
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Collusion 2013
O, never Shall sun that morrow see! Your face, my thane, is as a book where men May read strange matters. To beguile the time, Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under’t. He that’s coming Must be provided for: […]
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