The Critics · At the Theatre
The Walls of Coquina
In St. Augustine, a challenging and brilliant new experimental play uses the history of Florida's oldest city to explore the modern anxieties of survival.
To watch director Thomas Bennett’s new experimental play, *The Pelican’s Wing*, currently performing in the courtyard of a historic Spanish hospital in St. Augustine, is to experience history as a physical weight. The setting is spectacular: three high walls of pitted coquina stone, lit only by torchlight and the flickering projection of historic maps onto the masonry. The play, written by the rising young dramatist Chloe Vance, is a non-linear collage that weaves together three distinct narratives—a Spanish soldier in 1586, a modern archaeologist excavating a rising marsh, and a hotel maid during the Gilded Age tourist boom—to explore how the landscape of Florida has always been a space of fragile, defensive habitation.
The cast is small but exceptional, with each actor playing multiple roles across the different time periods. In one particularly brilliant sequence, the Spanish soldier, played with active, shell-shocked desperation by Paul Mescal, speaks in a slow, poetic prose about the rot of his armor and the constant, terrifying presence of the swamp, while the modern archaeologist, played by a sharp, clinical Sandra Oh, describes the carbon dating of the very wall he is standing against. The juxtaposition is thrilling, stripping away the romantic myths of history to reveal the shared, physical reality of people trying to survive in a landscape that is constantly trying to dissolve their labor.
The play’s final movement, which takes place in total silence except for the sound of the Atlantic tide splashing against the nearby sea-wall, is a stunning, minimalist coup de théâtre. The actors carefully arrange several dozen hollow coquina stones across the stage, creating a labyrinth that they then slowly dismantle as the torches are extinguished one by one. *The Pelican’s Wing* is a challenging, intellectual evening of theatre that refuses to offer tourists the easy comforts of historical pageantry. Instead, it demands that we confront the transience of our own buildings and lives in the face of an old, indifferent coast.