You’ve got these three women, Dread, Horror, and Alarm, the Graeae, those primordial hags who share one fucking eye between them, and they’re not tucked away in some theater where the already converted file in with their tote bags and good intentions. No. They’re at Aquatic Park, which if you know anything about San Francisco, is this weird municipal compromise between tourist postcard and actual living city. It’s where the Bay laps up against the land like it’s still not sure about the whole arrangement, where old Italian guys still swim in winter because that’s what they’ve always done, where joggers and junkies and families grilling on disposable barbecues all occupy the same crescent of sand and concrete.
And that’s exactly why it works, why it’s the only place this should happen.
See, the Graeae aren’t characters in a play. They’re older than that, older than drama itself. They’re the thing that exists before narrative, the dread you feel when you realize the universe doesn’t give a shit about your protagonist’s journey. And the witches in Macbeth? Same DNA. Shakespeare understood that prophecy isn’t plot device; it’s the way the world whispers that you’re already fucked, you just don’t know it yet. These performers carried that forward from that Fort Point production they did, let it mutate and grow stranger.
Aquatic Park sits there at the edge, neither fully sea nor fully city. It’s liminal space, the in-between where things get real and weird and true. The tourists don’t know they’re about to walk into mythology. They’re thinking about where to get clam chowder in a bread bowl, whether the cable car line is too long, and suddenly there’s fucking Alarm rising from the tideline looking like she’s been there since before the Gold Rush, before the Ohlone, before anyone decided this was a place worth naming.
And the beautiful, horrible thing is that most people probably barely noticed. Glanced over, maybe, thought it was some art project (which it was, but that’s reductive), went back to their sandwiches. But a few people got it. Felt that ancestral shiver. Recognized that these weren’t actors playing at ancient; they were channeling something that’s been waiting since humans first decided to tell each other stories about the things that scare us into being human.
That’s the real performance: the collision between the casual and the cosmic, happening right there where the city peters out and the Pacific begins its long argument with the continent.