We Players

We Players takes the meaning of site-specific participatory theater to new dimensions. Repeatedly, the company has produced innovative creative partnerships with waterscapes in all their unpredictability. After several productions near water (Macbeth staged at the seaside fortification Fort Point, Iphigenia and Other Daughters et Hamlet performed on Alcatraz Island), We Players set sail in 2011 abord the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park’s scow schooner Alma. Spectators, cast, and crew sailed around the Bay for 3 hours while Ava Roy’s adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey played out on the deck.

The following year, We Players brought The Odyssey to Angel Island in an all-day interactive trek crossing architectural remains and a majestic cliff standing in for Mount Olympus, with some scenes staged in or on the water, from an intimate bathtub scene to a beach party complete with a speed boat. 2012 also featured a rendition of Twelfth Night staged across the Hyde Street Pier, with Viola (played by director Ava Roy) arriving via rowboat and wading through the waters before collapsing of grief onto the sand. Succeeding scenes over the next 3 hours entice the spectators from the beach to the pier to the deck of a ferryboat, amidst the sonic seascape of seagulls, seals, and creaking ships.

But it was their breath-taking adaptation of Giraudoux’s Ondine at Sutro in 2015 that received the most glowingly ecstatic reviews. Here, land and water collided amidst the ruins of the 19th-century swimming pool complex situated on the San Francisco shoreline known as Sutro Baths. Sea-nymphs, naiads, lake spirits and sirens blurred the boundaries between human and non-human, mortal and immortal. Braving biting ocean breeze and spray as characters appear and disappear in the mist and fog, participants followed the fisherman’s tale across seascapes staged against a setting sun, witnessing nature as the greatest masterpiece of all. – A. Street