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. 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, whether the fog cooperates, which it won’t.
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. None. No producers asking for design renderings. No design renderings. We’ve got concrete, rust, wind, actors, audience. That’s it. That’s the whole inventory. So every conversation becomes: what does this mean? Not “how do we indicate the heath,” not “what does the heath signify,” but “where is the actual heath, right here, on this hill, in this wind.” The thing itself. The thing right here.
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, and look, that’s the deal, you don’t negotiate with the fog. So you’re solving problems instead. 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 do we just accept that somebody’s going to miss something? (Somebody’s going to miss something. The question is whether you planned for it or got surprised.)
And we’re having the real conversations. The ones nobody outside the room would understand. What’s John learned about playing this role that matters? What does Ava need from the space, actually need, not what would she like? 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. Because that’s what they’re doing. That’s what they paid for. That’s what we owe them.
On paper, on a different kind of show, there’s usually someone who holds the whole shape. Sets the staging. Calls the rehearsal. Decides when something is ready. On a different kind of project, with different collaborators, I might have held that shape from the front. From the front. On this one, the three of us held it together. Ava is the artistic director of We Players. The company has a clear leader and the leader is her. But on this production she made room for something different, and that room, that space she opened, is the thing the rest of this essay is really about. John has forty years of his own authority and doesn’t need to borrow mine. I had the angle from outside. What I was, what the role actually was, was the outside eye. The one who could see what they couldn’t see because they were inside the thing. The angle from across the room. The frame nobody can hold while standing in it.
The Fool’s speech, and look, Shakespeare wrote this four hundred years ago and somehow he knew, knew, what a rehearsal feels like:
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;
That speech is the diagram. The whole diagram. Everybody’s holding something back, revealing something else. John’s got forty years of technique he’s not showing me, yet, maybe ever, and that’s fine, that’s the deal, you don’t open the whole toolbox for anyone. Ava’s making choices I won’t understand until I see them, and then I’ll understand them like they were obvious the whole time, which is the trick. I’m tracking compositions and moments from outside that they can’t track from inside, because nobody can track a thing while they’re being it. True of a production. True of a life. True of the people we love most, who become harder to see the closer we stand to them. Somebody has to be the outside eye, and sometimes you trade the role back and forth without ever saying so, and sometimes you don’t, and that’s when it goes. The marriage, the friendship, the work, the self. Whatever it is, it goes, because nobody told you what you couldn’t see, and you couldn’t see it because you were inside it, doing it, being it.
With no one across the room… save me.
The light’s changing. We’ve got maybe twenty minutes before we lose it. Three sets of eyes. Three relationships to the same event. Trying to make something that matters to strangers who’ll be cold and tired and, by hour two, wondering if they should have just stayed home.
The multiple locations thing. The multiple locations thing. That’s the structural recognition that this text is about dissolution. About a kingdom fragmenting. About consciousness splitting apart. We’re not telling the audience the kingdom is breaking. We’re walking them through the break, one battery to the next, one wind angle to the next, until they’re doing the fragmenting in their own bodies, in their own legs, in the cold that’s worked its way through the jacket they thought was warm enough. Storm scene in the shelter. Hovel scene in the bunker. The blasted heath is the whole walk between them. The audience is the heath. They just haven’t figured that out yet.
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 they have no business being inside, we find the thing Shakespeare knew. The thing he absolutely knew. 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 spaces aren’t neutral. They’re not blank rooms. They’re not pretty backdrops. They’re saying something about American power, about obsolescence, about the things we build against the threats we can imagine, while the threats we can’t, time, age, madness, death, walk right through the walls.
Rest of the pictures are ☞ here ☜