The Minack Theatre rests at the edge of a cliff near the aptly named Land's End in Cornwall, England. The Atlantic Ocean below and beyond, as far as the eye can see. I saw a play there once, the moon rising during the first act, the most perfect spotlight. A place, once, for fishermen, now a scene for a play. The Guthrie stands alongside the Mississippi River, an artery in its early days for agriculture, then industry--a main pathway for communication. The Royal Danish Theatre emerges from the Oresund--the body of water between Copenhagen and Sweden--like Ophelia, rising to the surface; imposing, skeletal, frightening. On a notepad I used during my visit there, I wrote: "a theatre by the water--as shocking as going to Fairway in Brooklyn for the first time. There was a storm, wind whips, darkness falls." A tempest is never far from a theatre. Theatres should be on the water--a kind of sea unto themselves, where words drift and bob, and crash. In the theatre this week, I've been reading a play about the sea; I am transported by words and water, I am writing about and composed of water, I am tossed about by water, and soothed by it too. And when I leave this theatre, with its play about the sea, my first thought is to fly somewhere, and reach the ocean.
