This whole thing started in a coffee shop in New Brunswick in March of 2010.

Maybe not, though. Maybe late January’s a better fit. There was a late night, and some Scotch, and…

Well, actually, no. First, there was the summer of 2004, and the summer of 2005, in which…

Still no.

Okay.

A few years ago, some of us ran a theater at a local university (a picture from the 2005 production of Picasso at the Lapin Agile can be found to the left. Ah, nostalgia). The deal was, and remains, pretty simple—around a dozen college kids are granted a space, a series of resources, and the task of producing six shows in nine weeks. It’s like a season of the Real World—twelve strangers, picked to live in an on-campus townhouse, and spend a summer with their lives taken over by So Much Drama.

Well, that trivializes things a bit (I’m not very good at just giving this in one straight shot, am I?). But anyway, in central New Jersey, a group of us came together and spent a summer making theater, with very little in the way of supervision or rules beyond that which we gave one another. We lived together. We cooked for one another. We slept together. And every day, we rehearsed, we built, we lit, we wrote, we sang, we fought, we screamed, we managed, we talked and we sold our shows. Eight performances a week, we welcomed audiences into the theater that had become our home and we told them stories. And they loved some of what we did and hated some of what we did, but they came back. From June to August, we made a community out of ourselves and built that community out into something that felt sort of permanent, lie though it was.

And we’re all a little bit older now. All with degrees, some with families, and some of us earn our paycheck still doing what we did that summer—we tell stories, we make art, we support the making of art. And some of us do other things—and that was part of the wonder of it, too. For a summer, a nascent engineer could be a set designer, a pre-law student could be a playwright, a future biologist could be an actor—and it would count, and people would see it, and a different aspect and talent would come forth and let us redefine ourselves a little bit. In hindsight, we spent a summer with a sort of magic in mind, in a place that couldn’t otherwise exist. Brigadoon, Xanadu, Oz…it’s the sort of thing people who love theater know a little bit about. Neverland, too. Of course. Neverland, too.

And that’s why there’s NeverLanding; this is a love-letter to that summer, and to the bigger story and feelings of what happens when young people are given the time and place to exercise a little creativity and a lot of libido, and what happens next.

Here, we’ll be sharing a little bit of how the making of NeverLanding works, and talking about theater, and ourselves, perhaps a little too much. It all feels a little vain and gossipy. But then again, maybe that’s the point of all of this too. If you don’t talk about the things you love and remember, they tend to fall by the wayside.

More to come.