(Not that it matters too much now, but this post contains some spoilers for the final performances of No One Else Will Ever Love You.)

Here are seven things I’ve learned since stepping into the director’s role at the beginning of this project:

1. As a journalist, especially an arts writer, it’s easy to forget the difference between working constantly on a zillion small projects and working for a sustained period on a single large one. It’s not that one is inherently more satisfying than the other – though I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy the sustained charge of writing a book or directing a play – but it’s a privileged position, to be writing about. It takes me, on average, 3-4 hours to review a play. An hour or two to watch it, maybe another hour to talk about it with Kat or whoever my +1 was, and to roll it around in my head, and then an hour to type it. With that inherent imbalance in the time commitment in criticism as compared to creating even a very modest work –whether it’s theater reviewing or mp3 blogging or literary criticism – it’s really vital to never be lazy when crafting a response to the piece. It’s okay to hate the piece. It’s okay to call out a loathsome piece of art as being awful. But it’s not okay to do so lazily, because you’re up against a deadline, or because you’re tired, or because you were in a bad mood when you saw it. Snark has no place in criticism – which is a shame, because it’s easy and fun, and the common idiom of the Internet. But it’s only fair in an even exchange. A three minute song takes more time to write than it does to listen to and review, so it’s not fair to be dismissive of it. That imbalance is only magnified when you move onto theater, or film, or – for fuck’s sake – books. You don’t have to be nice, but if you can’t be thoughtful about why something sucks, you probably haven’t got much of a place at the conversation.

2. This cast is genuinely incredible. I know that’s something everyone is supposed to say about every group of people ever assembled for any project ever, but speaking with critical objectivity*, it’s true: They’ve taught me some of how to do this job, and they’ve done it with grace and humor and through the hard work of indulging my bad ideas, reacting to my good ones, and helping me learn to identify the difference. I couldn’t have asked for a group that was more willing to explore the script with me, and by extension, teach me how big a part of the director’s job that is.

3. My wife is a remarkable writer. No, seriously. I spent a lot of time with her in the writing process of this script – she started it years ago, and it’s been through a number of iterations. And, as she finally narrowed in on a final draft at the beginning of the summer, I spent a lot of time talking through the structure with her, just like she helped me talk through the second half of In The Time In Between. Since I was so intimately involved in the writing process, I assumed that I knew every trick of the script, and that my initial understanding of each line was all there was to it. But there are no throwaway lines here. Pieces of dialogue that I thought were insignificant are actually subtle bombs she planted to explode the characters’ self-perception, and every moment in the working process that led us to discover a "he’s the one who sent us on our honeymoon" or "We’ve been engaged two weeks, okay?" has been a new chance to be impressed with how effortlessly talented she is at crafting characters and telling a story through dialogue. I’m humbled by her talent.

4. A year of dealing constantly with editors has made me way less sensitive that I thought I’d be, especially as it relates to bad reviews. We received four reviews for No One Else Will Ever Love You. One was very short and more Yelp-y, and it doesn’t really require much thought. Two of the others said mostly the same things, though one liked the fact that the characters had little backstory available and one thought it was a weakness of the script, and the last one gave that shit the finger. I generally feel pretty good about all four reviews, and took none of them personally. Which is a nice feeling, given that putting yourself out there is the point of doing these things. It’s better to respond to that well.

5.My favorite things about the performances:

• Bastion Carboni has a mostly unlikeable character as Charlie. He’s petulant and argumentative and self-obsessed, and there’s a part of the script that was written to display his deep insecurity. He re-enters the scene having just been out for a cigarette with Karina’s character, Jen, whom he loathes, and as it’s written he comes back a nervous wreck, agreeing to let Jen take over the wedding because he’s scared that if he doesn’t, he won’t know how to do it and it’ll never happen. Bastion completely flipped that interpretation on its head, and instead comes back from having talked to her about it positively giddy with the fact that they’ve announced their wedding to his fiancee, Nora’s, friends. What I’d have played as another chance to show what a loser this guy is, Bastion played as a moment to show him as genuine and human.
• Karina Dominguez really inhabited Jen, and the physicality that she brings to the role is so much fun to watch every night. Rather than seek an alternate interpretation for the character, she embraced her fully. There’s a moment near the end when she’s asking to be put to bed, and she holds her hands out, expecting to be picked up, and it’s the most subtle and emasculating thing she does, setting up beautifully the scene that follows it, which she’s not even in. She’s an actor who works for the other characters in the script, and it’s something that makes her a huge asset to have on stage.
• Spencer Driggers completely exceeded my expectations for what Rick, the yuppie asshole, could be. Because on the page, again, he’s just a yuppie asshole, and even when he’s annoyed or frustrated, he’s still easy to see as being always in control. When Kat and I were first talking about this play, she had offered the part of Rick to a friend of hers whom she had been in another show with. When I agreed to direct it, I made the tough decision to rule him out and go after Spencer, because I was really confident that he’d bring a lot of humanity to Rick that it would be so easy to lose. There’s a moment at the end where Rick’s emotionally vulnerable for the first time, as Nora’s yelling at him, and he yells back, and it says something about their relationship that was never on the page (and which wouldn’t work on the page) - it says this is hard for him too. And that moment, when you can empathize with that guy, is the reason I think this play works as more than just awful people doing awful things to one another.
• Jennymarie Jemison, as the lead and clear protagonist, had the toughest role, as she’s playing a character who’s largely absent in the script. All of the actors had a few key defining characteristics that were clear from their first appearance on the page to work from, and Jenny’s character is defined by her tendency to shrink, which is difficult to perform while still maintaining the role of the protagonist. I think she could play every role in everything. If I got a press release tomorrow from someone who announced that they were doing a production of Twelve Angry Men as a one-person solo show, and Jenny were playing every part, I’d be like, that’s a fucking good idea. She takes a part that could have easily been played as a shrinking violet and turns her into a reflection of what’s going on with the characters around her. You can follow the entire through-line of the play by watching her eyes. Every actor pushed both him- or herself - and me - to look beyond the obvious, surface interpretation of these people as airheads, or assholes, or pretentious goofballs, and turn them into living people whose choices, while sometimes inexcusable, are nonetheless understandable. Jenny’s character had no surface interpretation - she was given very little definition as a choice made by the script, and the way that she turned her into a real person, confined by the fact that she’s been unable to define herself, is what makes the entire play work for me.

6. Theater really is a unique and powerful artform. I knew that. I mean, I’d seen work that resonated with me in really powerful ways before. But I don’t think I totally understood the visceral impact of doing it live in front of you until I had a hand in it, and saw why things work in this setting that might not work otherwise. That’s something I owe to the more negative reviews that we got, too - things that don’t always work on an intellectual level succeed on a visceral one, and having the ability to tap into that, to make people uncomfortable as they’re watching a woman get slapped in the face by a man five feet away, to have a screaming fight go on right in front of you, that’s something that isn’t duplicated by any other medium. I know that all y’all who actually studied this shit have read all the theory about this, but learning it firsthand, learning that it doesn’t matter so much how you intellectualize an experience that can hit you hard in the moment, and learning that it’s unique to this one medium - it’s a really exciting thing to understand fully. I’ve always loved live performance, but I’m getting an even firmer grasp now on why.

7. I’ve been a solo act for almost my entire creative/artistic life. As a performer, I’ve limited myself to the one man show. As a writer, I’ve embraced non-collaborative forms almost exclusively, whether it’s as a novelist or a poet or a journalist. I’ve never really had the opportunity to collaborate on a project like this before, and I’ve been a full-time creative-person for many years now. It’s an entirely different kind of rewarding to be part of something that’s bigger than the sum of its parts, and I’m delighted that I’ve been able to share this experience with the people that I have. I genuinely have no idea if I want to do this again - at the end of the rehearsal process, I was pretty sure that I did, because it’s such a thrill to work collaboratively and explore telling a story with such insightful and fun people. As distance has passed between then and now, though, I’m exhausted, and inviting that exhaustion in again is a little bit daunting. Whether this was a diversion or a thing I’ll pursue, though, it’s going to inform so much of what I do going forward. I’m really glad that I had the chance to do it.

And that’s a lot of lessons to take from any experience. It’s funny - this was never anywhere close to on my radar. When I told my friends that I was doing it, they were mostly like, uh… a play? It’s like I told them that I had decided to become a race car driver or a high school football coach or something. I mean, I like theater, and cars, and football - but this is a level of commitment to it that I didn’t expect to make. And regardless of everything else, it’s good to find that there are whole new things that you can try. That high school football team better look out.

*Kidding, there’s no such thing.