For six years, I dreamed of staging a play based on William Shakespeare’s first tragedy, Titus Andronicus. To this day, it remains the largest theater production I’ve ever directed. The translation of the play, the search for funding, and the casting process took a very long time. However, once I began working on it, I realized that I would have to make creative compromises that I really didn’t want to make. In the end, the play only contained about 30 percent of what I had originally envisioned.

I wanted a large cast, so I invited ten people whom I enjoyed working with to act in the play. I never thought there could be any underlying tension between them. During a rehearsal, when I asked them to form a tight circle, they didn’t do it. That’s when I realized I had dug myself into a hole. Besides, all the actors had other jobs, and they only showed up for the first group rehearsal a day before the dress rehearsal. Until then, during rehearsals, we had to imagine some actors in the scenes as they were absent. As a result, my biggest production was rehearsed only once.

Time was tight, people and money were scarce, a million things had to be coordinated, and I had to be the producer of the play myself. I was a director who wasn’t directing, but trying to get by every day. During the premiere, I was shattered. I felt immense fatigue, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep directing.

People like the play, and eventually, I grew to love it too. However, for me, the process is more important than the result, and the process here was like eating dirt. That’s why there’s some bitterness left. In general, sometimes in the theater, I feel like a stranger. I don’t fit in. There are many theater people who don’t know I exist, and there are some who wonder how I, who don’t play by the rules, managed to survive in the theater.

I don’t have an elitist attitude towards theater and that comes with a price because theater is inherently elitist. It’s like trying to participate in figure skating competition with a bike and then getting nervous because it’s not working out.

I don’t know if I learned anything from that situation. I’m about to start rehearsing for another play, so as Michael Scott said in The Office: “I am ready to get hurt again.”