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 carry through concrete, whether the audience walks this way or that way, whether they’re sheltered or exposed at any given moment.
And here’s what matters about working with people like Ava and John on something like this: there’s no bullshit budget between you and the work. No producers asking for design renderings. We’ve got concrete, rust, wind, actors, audience. That’s it. So every conversation becomes: what does this mean? Not “how do we indicate the heath” but “where is the actual heath, right here in this landscape?”
The collaboration isn’t precious. It can’t be. We’re working in spaces without heat, without proper lighting positions, where the fog rolls in whether you want atmosphere or not. So you’re solving problems: How do we keep the audience moving? How do we time this so they’re in the shelter during the storm monologue? What happens when someone has to piss, do we build that into the journey or just accept that someone’s going to miss something?
And we’re having the real conversations: What’s John learned about playing this role that matters? What does Ava need from the space? What do I see that they can’t see from inside the work? Where’s the image that makes all of this concrete, literally and metaphorically, for an audience that chose to show up on a cold day and walk through decommissioned military infrastructure to watch two people perform a play about dying?
Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest,
Lend less than thou owest,
Ride more than thou goest,
Learn more than thou trowest,
Set less than thou throwest;
This Fool speech, that’s collaboration in a nutshell. Everybody’s holding something back, revealing something else. John’s got forty years of technique he’s not showing me. Ava’s making choices I won’t understand until I see them. I’m seeing compositions and moments they can’t see because they’re inside them. Three people with three different relationships to the same event, trying to make something that matters to strangers who’ll be cold and tired and wondering if they should have just stayed home.
The multiple locations thing. That’s the structural recognition that this text is about dissolution. About a kingdom fragmenting. About consciousness splitting apart.
And somewhere in all this, in the concrete that smells like rust and piss and history, in the wind that won’t stop just because we’re trying to perform, in the actual physical exhaustion of dragging an audience through abandoned military infrastructure, somewhere in there, we find the thing Shakespeare knew: that stripping away comfort doesn’t diminish us, it clarifies us. That necessity makes vile things precious. That the truth looks different when we’re cold and lost and the only light is whatever light we brought with us.
Building this thing with John and Ava means accepting that half our plans will get demolished by weather or logistics or the simple fact that concrete doesn’t care about our vision. It means adapting. It means the collaboration is partly with the space itself, which has its own history, its own meaning, its own demands. These space aren’t neutral. They’re saying something about American power, about obsolescence, about the things we build to protect ourselves from imaginary threats while the real threats, time, age, madness, death, walk right through the walls.
Rest of the pictures are ☞ here ☜