I stand there in the damp brick corridors of Fort Point with a camera and Shakespeare’s murder ballad echoing off Civil War-era walls, and I start to understand something about why I do this stupid, beautiful thing called documentation. Not because theater needs more goddamn photos. But because Ava and her company decided to stage Macbeth in a place that already knows about ambition, blood, and the slow rot of imperial dreams.
The light in this fort is a motherfucker, honest light, the kind that doesn’t apologize. Natural light cutting through gun ports originally designed to kill people, now framing Lady Macbeth‘s face as she summons spirits to unsex her. I’m crouching in archways, moving through the audience like some documentarian ghost, trying to catch the moment when Ava’s eyes go dead-cold with ambition, and I realize this isn’t performance art, it’s exorcism.
Site-integrated theater, they call it, which is just fancy talk for admitting that place matters, that a fortress built to protect San Francisco Bay from naval assault has its own violence to contribute to Shakespeare’s script. The actors move through spaces tourists photograph during the day, and suddenly you’re not shooting theater, you’re shooting possession. The fort becomes complicit.
More pictures? Yeah, ☞ they’re here.