“Every man has a woman that teaches him that he can love. The hell of it is he usually has to lose her to find that out. And once he knows it, the best that he can hope for is that the hurting will eventually turn into some kind of haunting. “

These words that Frank speaks at the tail end of Bill Harris’s indelible, fastidiously crafted epic love story, Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone, shook me to my core. Frank is a black soldier in the military who falls hard for Rula, a tormented singer on tour across small town USA. What I seek to explore as director is the notion of their tumultuous relationship causing a form of PTSD even worse than war. I chose to set the play in the present-day at the US Army Post Exchange, to immerse the audience in the point of view of Frank recounting this story to his comrades. His narrative and memory will serve as an audiovisual journey through the trauma of his first love which tore him up so deeply that his life is on the line. As an Afro-Caribbean storyteller with Haitian roots, I sought to incorporate elements of modern Afrobeats, originally scored by pop musician DAWIN, and a dreamlike, impressionist soundscape to score the play. This deeply personal chronicle of romance between two underrepresented Black characters is a timeless tale that I hope audiences will be able to use as a reflection of any romantic trauma they have also overcome.