I could not have directed this play in my 20s or 30s—I had not loved enough. Maybe I still haven’t, but I’m closer. We live so many types of love, but signify it with only one word. When we say we love someone do we mean the love between a parent and a child, between friends, between brothers, between husband and wife, between lovers? How do we define love? How do we express that love?
The most difficult task two people in love have is communication. Love resides in the ether, but can only be shared through the physical, the real—our actions and our words. If at the heart of love lies honesty and trust, how can words and actions possibly communicate that which is indefinable? How can passion, desire, fear, excitement, sadness, ecstasy…everything…be corralled by lines on a paper, or sounds thrown through the air? We communicate our love; perhaps we even utter the words, “I love you.” We want our actions and our words to express this love. But love is messy. When we communicate with those we love we try to find that honesty, to express the truth and depth of our feelings. But we bring too much of ourselves to the table. Our emotion is colored by our own personal shortcomings that we project onto those we love; it is colored by our own desires and needs, and what we perceive as the desires and needs of those we love. It is colored by our own broken pasts, and our fervent desires for a more complete future. So we equivocate. We hold back. We say things we don’t mean. We say things we do mean, and fear the vulnerability it brings. In our desire to protect, we harm.
But the love is always there. It never goes away, or we wouldn’t be hurt.
That is my approach to George and Martha. These are not two people falling out of love. These are two people desperately trying to connect, but they are too smart for their own good. Their words are beautiful and sharp and witty and funny and cutting and elusive. They are fun to listen to. They are painful to understand. “Truth or illusion, George,” Martha pleads. George and Martha are still in love,--always will be--they just need to find their truth.
This has been the most difficult, and fulfilling of plays to direct. You can’t work with this script and not confront the love you have in your own life. The words possess you. You dream them. You find yourself uttering them as you walk across campus. Your own perception of love changes, and deepens; it’s a harder, but warmer truth. Working with these artists has been a beautiful experience, as we each search for our own truths through the script, as we each privately confront our own idea of love, and then lay it on the boards as art. When artists work they are sharing their lives. They are using the illusion of the stage to discover truth. It is a communion with that which we love. Our loves at home, our fellow artists, our art, and all those words.
Please come see the show. You will laugh—if the show is about love, how can it not be about laughter too? You will experience passion. You will claw your way through illusion. You will be shocked. You will be offended. You will see a piece of yourselves in George, Martha, Nick and Honey. You will also hate them all a little bit. But you will love them too.
You will love.
Warmly,
Shane Brown
