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 gun ports in shafts, harsh and specific, and I’m trying to chase it with the camera before it moves, as the fog rolls in, before an actor pivots into shadow. Which would be on me this time since I designed the lights for this version of We Players Macbeth at Fort Point.
The witches are probably the best thing about this whole endeavor. They’re not doing costume-shop spooky. They’re something older, something that belongs in these shadows and salt-stained bricks. They move through those brick archways under the Golden Gate like they grew there, like the fort itself conjured them up from 150 years of military paranoia and rust and salt wind. They’re elemental. They’re right.
Ava Roy‘s still directing like someone who actually understands what “site-specific” means, it’s not just cute because there are arches, it’s because the space has its own malevolence, its own geometry of paranoia. These casemates were built to watch for enemies that never came, to fire cannons at threats that materialized mostly in the fevered imagination of 19th-century military contractors. The fort IS the Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Scotland, Denmark, Fort Point, it’s all the same architecture of dread.
But then…Jesus Christ. The music.
It’s like someone recorded a telenovela soundtrack in 1977 on equipment stolen from a condemned high school A/V department, then copied it sixteen times on degrading magnetic tape until it sounded like it was being played through a swimming pool full of sewage by the world’s most earnest thirteen-year-olds who just learned what a crescendo is and plan to abuse the knowledge. It wants SO BADLY to be ominous. It’s trying. You can hear it trying. And that’s somehow worse than if it just sucked with confidence.
But I keep shooting. Because John’s got actual presence as Macbeth, Ava’s doing real work, and those witches are making you believe in prophecy and fate and all the old terrible machinery of tragedy. The music’s a betrayal of everything else that’s working, but the rest of it? The rest of it’s worth the effort of being here, under this bridge, in this cold, chasing light that doesn’t want to be caught.
More pictures? Yeah, ☞ they’re here.