“We Players have been turning public spaces into impromptu playhouses for more than a decade (last year was Hamlet on alcatraz), but in May, the group presented its most audacious performance yet: a five-hour roving rendition of The Odyssey on angel Island, wherein the audience is conscripted into the story to cavort with mythical monsters against the backdrop of the San Francisco skyline. With a piece of theater that could leave you grass-stained, sunburned, and in the market for a bronze chest plate, We Players didn’t just break the fourth wall, it toppled the whole playhouse“

 

 

 

 

 

“This year marks the end of We Players’ three-year collaboration with the National Parks    Service on Alcatraz Island. The project showcased the island’s scenic isolation in a number of  artistic and community-building endeavors. The stage company’s 2010 marathon production of Hamlet was a tour de force of site-specificity, taking actors and audiences all over the island, including areas normally off-limits to the public. In their imaginative stagings of Macbeth, Hamlet, and Iphigenia, as well as their ongoing art exhibitions for, by, and about incarcerated juveniles and adults, the Players highlight themes of isolation, incarceration, justice, and redemption. They wield their art as a catalyst rather than as nostalgic revival. Their Alcatraz residency ends in the fall. In 2012, it partners with the California Parks Service to stage The Odyssey on Angel Island.”