Ava Roy grew up in rural Western Massachusetts, in an area rich in literature and theater. Ava met Ann Podlozny back east before Ava came to California to attend Stanford, which is where she created a theater production group.

Today, Ava is the founding artistic director of We Players, a 25-year-old theater company based in San Francisco. Ann, who'll play Lady Macbeth in an upcoming, all-woman production of Macbeth, is based in London and came back to be in the play and to support her friend Ava in whatever way she can.

While at Stanford, Ava let her art play, in the sense of public displays such as throwing banners off the clock tower and tying bodies to sculptures around campus. She discovered that art would be her life's work, not just a hobby.

One idea she had while in Palo Alto was to do a production of Shakepeare's Romeo and Juliet held all around the Stanford campus. It was a success, as the audience grew and grew as it moved around, picking up more and more people along the way. Ava was able to turn this type of theater into an independently designed major.

After graduating, she moved to the East Bay and started doing theater productions there and in The City. She started partnering with the National Park Service (NPS) in 2008 and then with SF Recreation and Parks in 2018.

Ava's first production at Fort Point, the Civil War-era fort under the southern base of the Golden Gate Bridge, was in 2008. From 2009 to 2011, she had a three-year residency on Alcatraz, further deepening her relationship with the NPS. In 2013, she kicked off Macbeth at Fort Point. But a funny thing happened—a government shutdown that year effectively ended that run under the bridge.

Fast-forward nearly a decade, and the NPS reached out to see whether Ava and We Players were interested in trying again to produce Macbeth at Fort Point. That brings us to the present day.

Ava's friend Ann had left theater and had been working in movies. She'd also been taking epic walks—as in hundreds of miles at a time, all over the world. She was on one of these walks when she and Ava connected over Zoom and Ann offered to play the part of Lady Macbeth to Ava's Macbeth in We Players' upcoming production.

Ann would not only play one of the two major roles in the play, but she would also be there for Ava to help with various aspects of putting it all together, including casting. It was somewhere in this time that the decision was made for this to be an all female-identifying and non-binary cast. We Players is run and was founded by women, but they hadn't done a production with a cast like this before. It was 2024, before the election. It just felt right.

Ann and Ava talk about the themes of Macbeth and how they relate to the current times we're in, no matter who we are. Ava touches on how important it is for her to foster a caring, kind, nurturing environment among her cast members, and how poignant that is for such a violent play like Macbeth.

Then we pivot to talk about how times have changed, 10 years removed from the last time they did this at Fort Point, and how they have not. Ava also describes what it's like inside of Fort Point, something we in San Francisco might not all know about. One point they want to emphasize for anyone who comes to see their show—it's cold as hell, even by SF standards.

We Players' production of Macbeth at Fort Point opens on April 11 and runs through May 18. All shows start at 6 p.m., Thursday through Sunday (with a few exceptions), rain or wind (duh) or shine. Tiered tickets (for equitable access) are available at the We Players website.

We recorded this episode in the Gramercy Towers in March 2025.

Photography by Jeff Hunt