At 5:55 a.m. on July 1st, 2015 we performed a site specific theatre production of an unattributed fragment of one of the lost tragedies by Euripides’ at Aquatic Park in San Francisco. Informally, the piece is called No Man’s Friend. This work is part of a larger project called IOTA that brings to life the fragments for the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
The weather was partly cloudy with a temperature of 62℉. The duration of the site responsive performance was six and half minutes for an audience of 11 (3 of whom were joggers and 1 was a baby in a stroller).
The Fragment…
No man’s friend stays faithful to his tomb.
The Location…
In 1902, it became illegal to bury new bodies in the city. By 1921, the bodies were being moved en masse to Colma. By 1941 nearly all of San Francisco’s cemeteries were gone.
Most of the city’s early dead, the ones that filled the early cemeteries, were loners, miners, and immigrants. These bodies ended up in mass graves in Colma, and their original tombstones were placed in the city’s rubble pile
for use in building projects within the city
Aquatic Park, a Works Progress Administration project started in 1936, is made up of these tombstones, and large piles of these grave markers are visible and exposed at low tide.
Collaborators…
Jamie Lyons (concept and direction)
with Val Sinkler & Jamie Freebury