Review: No One Else Will Ever Love You by Katherine Craft & Dan Solomon
by Michael Meigs
Offering a play in someone's house or apartment breaks down some of the conventions of theatre. There's more of a sense of risk for all concerned -- players, audience and host.
In most theatrical events the audience is anonymous, a collection of shapes outside the brightly lit playing space. And most of them like it that way. The front row never fills up first. Maybe there's a latent worry about sitting within grasp of the actors.
No One Else Will Ever Love You is theatre up close, in the living room instead of in the reassurance of a formal theatre setting. The cast uses a different living space each weekend.
I was wandering around condominiums on East 33rd street last Friday evening with an address on a slip of paper. I must have been pretty obvious when I walked behind the building into the parking lot. "Looking for the play?" asked a neighbor as he was pulling out of his parking slot. "It's over there, behind that wall."
I walked back around to the front. No sign. It was dark outside the ground floor apartment. But through the window I could see a few persons standing in the living room. I knocked, asked, and was admitted.
"Hi," said Rachel. "Yes, it's here. I guess we'd better turn on the outside light. Welcome! Want something to drink or a homemade cookie? Just over here in the kitchen!"
Two rows of six miscellaneous chairs stood along the living room wall. Several persons were chatting, and two women arrived after I did. Another couple seated comfortably in the back row was studying the folded page that served as a program. I took my favorite location,front row center, in this case on the aisle because the front door was just behind us. Next to me a man was deeply engaged with his I-phone.
The evening was sold out. We settled. We waited.
The front door opened behind us. A young couple strode into the living room and stopped. They ignored us, paused and consulted one another. Were they too early?
We heard a rhythmic thumping from the bedroom. No, not too early. Their hosts had gotten wrapped up in something else.
Katherine Craft's play is about two couples in their late 20s or early 30s. When hosts Rick and Jen come out from the bedroom to us, somewhat disheveled and with semi-apologetic grins, we learn that they have just returned from their honeymoon in Australia.
Spencer Driggers as Rick is relaxed, smiling and self-certain, a financial success with a web venture, and his bride Jen, played by Karina Dominguez, adores him.
Charlie and Nora are less assured. We had already learned in their first moments in front of us that they intend to get married, but to date they've told no one, not even their families. Nora wants to announce it first to Rick and Jen.
Her guy Charlie is a musician and artist, mystified by this urging. He doesn't really know these people. As the evening proceeds he becomes increasingly annoyed at their privilege and Rick's teasing arrogance.
As you might expect from the set-up, No One Else Will Ever Love You is about coupling. Not about copulation, though the back story certainly featured that somewhere, but principally about the risks and dependencies as members of a couple negotiate their relationships with one another and with other individuals. Craft is also looking at the nasty glint of power and deception.
Director Dan Solomon did some courting of his own for this production. He acknowledges that he picked these actors individually because he had seen them perform. If they had declined, he said, the play would not have happened. "There was never anyone else who could have played these parts."
Two couples, crossed relationships, some dissembling, some gloating, incomprehension and resentment. . . this one could have turned into lengthy exercise in trivialities and clichés. It could equally have turned into a facile push into violent aggression; a writer with less confidence might have been tempted to bring on a weapon toward the end, in order to clip these complications clean.
Instead, Craft uses two principal strengths: dialogue that's sharp, responsive and credible, and plotting that pushes these individuals together in encounters, both as a group of four and by threes and twos, calculated to reveal gradually to us their assumptions, their characters, and their relationships. There is, indeed, violence, but it is principally psychological.
That is her focus: the immediacy of hidden boiling emotions in an otherwise apparently banal encounter.
The right now of the encounter is emphasized because the writer gives these characters almost no pasts. We witness and hear a teasing familiarity that suggests a long story between two of them, but get no detail.
Director Dan Solomon's notes in the program suggest that the playwright has run these characters against one another over and over, in different variations, and they come to us from her mind with clean , empty background dossiers. And with no other known acquaintances or family, except perhaps for the mention of the money from Rick's dad to bankroll the web enterprise. We don't have their geographic or social origins, and the evening takes place in a locale unidentified except by the fact that they're all speaking colloquial American English.
So they could be anyone. They could be us, in our 20-to-30-year-old-selves, in that perilous moment of searching for permanent attachment, when we strive after the right solution to the mating game. When right now wants perfect and forever.
Theatre writer Dan Solomon enriches his knowledge of this multiple art by taking on the function of director for the first time. Offering his chin in genteel fashion, he expressed the hope that other writers and the subjects of his own screeds might comment on the result.
His program notes confirm that by intuition or by design he succeeded at the first, most important task of a stage director -- selecting a cast that has the talent and the craft to make the director essentially invisible. Theatre is a collaborative art, and the results of this collaboration suggest that he was smart enough to draw the lines, block the action, set the concept and then get out of the way. Driggers was new to me, but I've seen and appreciated Jemison, Dominguez and Carboni onstage. The chemistry was there. Casting playwright/director/actor Carboni as the moody outsider artist in a bourgeois world was brazen but right on target.
The French have a word for it (as, tiresomely, they often do). It's not "director" -- it's metteur-en-scène, "the one who puts everything together on the stage." The same term, "metteur," is used for the professional who mounts gems in jewelry.
The metteur-en-scene is working with human beings, not with stones. His is a profoundly personal relation with the work of art.
Dan Solomon is married to the playwright. He courted and won a gifted cast to the work, and he enabled them. And after the dramatic conclusion of No One Else Will Ever Love You. in Rachel's apartment, the cast, the director and most of the audience joined in a spontaneous celebration, enjoying those cookies and drinks from the kitchen.
Reviews by Will Hollis Snider and Susie Gidseg, austinist.com, September 10
Writer Dan Solomon's reflections on this, his first time as a director, September 12
Actor Bastion Carboni interviews director Dan Solomon on Austinist.com, 8/28
EXTRA
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No One Else Will Ever Love You
by Katherine Craft
Katherine Craft & Dan Solomon
to be revealed
Austin, TX, 78700
