Review: No One Else Will Ever Love You

Austinist theater writer Dan Solomon recently made his directorial debut with Katherine Craft's No One Else Will Ever Love You, which runs through September 12th at private residences in Austin. In the interest of turnabout being fair play, we offered the opportunity to review his production to the directors of the plays that Solomon has reviewed so far in 2009. All theatermakers who directed a full-length play reviewed by Solomon before mid-August were invited to participate, and two of them—Touch's Susie Gidseg and Orestes' Will Hollis Snider—agreed to offer their thoughts.

Ed Note: The following reviews have been edited for grammar and punctuation, but unchanged in content.

Will Hollis Snider:

Theatre, by its very nature, is voyeuristic. In a typical theatrical venue, this voyeurism is accepted without question. The audience is paying to watch. So, it is rarely given another thought. That invisible fourth wall gives the audience a bit of breathing room. With No One Else Will Ever Love You, we are invited into a stranger's home and seated in chairs in a living room. No fourth wall to allow us to breathe easy. While the majority of the action takes place in front of us, entrances sometimes come from behind, and, the weekend I saw it, sometimes from the stairs leading down into the living room.

We become intimately aware of this voyeurism from the opening moment of the play, when Nora and Charlie enter through the front door. We find that they are not alone in the house as loud rhythmic "noises" echo from upstairs. This voyeurism, and the intimate, subtle nature of the performances, are the greatest strengths of the production. However, the play isn't without its flaws.

At its core, the play is exactly what the title hints that it might be. People often settle for a someone or a situation because he or she believes that there isn't something better out there. [It's] a universal theme that is easy to connect to. However, for an ensemble piece about the characters that inhabit the play, it's can be difficult to connect with that universal theme when the characters aren't as fleshed out as well as they could be.

From the beginning, I was impressed by Katherine Craft's ability to find unique voices for each of her characters. Dan Solomon and his actors found the right balance between the humor and drama. However, as the play neared its climax, I had yet to receive much information about the character's pasts. [In] the way they cared for and acted with one another, I knew that a past existed, but there wasn't enough tangible information given to believe every action and motivation.

While I believe that exposition can be deadly, and hints can be given through subtext (and it sometimes was), the play suffered from a lack of this exposition. I wanted to care for these characters, but with such little information about their pasts, it was difficult to do so. I wanted to connect with Nora, but I didn't know enough about her to care what happened to her. A moment which gave great insight into Spencer Drigger's character, Rick, was when it was revealed from whom he had received startup capital for his new website. This information allowed the audience to have a better understanding of his character's motivations behind his actions throughout the play. On the other side of the fence, when one of the characters professes his love to the other, it wasn't as believable as it might have been if there was more of a hint of their past together.

Giving characters an everyman quality can work, and often does, but I believe the intimate nature of this production would be be better served by giving the audience some nuggets of information to flesh out the characters. The template is there; I feel it just needs to be filled in with a little bit more information. I want to see those details that make them Charlie, Nora, Rick and Jen.

Susie Gidseg:

I came to No One Else Will Ever Love You with as open a mind as possible. That being said, for the sake of transparency, I have directed three of the four actors before, and have enjoyed working with them all immensely.

There are many beautiful moments in this script. Up close and personal, in the actors' faces, literally (the way I like to be as an audience member) you do not miss any move, gesture or subtext. Sometimes this works for the show, and sometimes against it.

It has been said that 90 percent of being a good director is casting the show properly, and in this Dan Solomon succeeded admirably. Each of these actors was perfectly cast, embracing their parts with gusto. The flaws, unfortunately, lie in the script. While this is the sort of small character drama I love to watch, I felt like there were holes where important bits of information were missing, and spots where I simply did not believe that the characters would do what was written. Since the actors, for all intents and purposes, were acting their butts off, it became clear that the problem areas lay in the script itself. I didn’t believe the animosity between the actors. I wanted more push to the fights, or higher stakes. I wanted to see passion between Jemison and Driggers. I wanted to believe that Jemison and Carboni really had love between them. It was hard to buy a previous love affair between Jemison and Driggers. When the supposed twist ending was revealed at the conclusion of the play, A la Neil Labute, it just didn’t have any impact. It's not the actors' fault; the lines simply were not there to get them where they needed to be emotionally.

Many of the scenes, taken apart from the greater context of the play, were well written and witty. The back and forth banter between the four was enjoyable, and the dialogue contemporary. However, I felt almost as if I was watching some great scene work that perhaps didn’t all fit together inside the same play. No One Else Will Ever Love You has the beginnings of a really interesting, funny script, and Solomon’s idea to play it in different living rooms, combined with the spot on casting, made the whole experience an enjoyable one. The building blocks for a solid show are there, but Craft just needs a little more time workshopping the text to truly make it a success.

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