Playwright Charlie Rinehart-Jones loves a messy friend group. His latest production, BATHERS, featuring Clara McGregor, Jordan Coley, and Sadie Scott among others, isn’t his first foray into the territory. Just seven months after his theatrical debut, LIFESTYLES, he sends another yuppie-zillennial rat pack on the world’s worst vacation. What could go wrong when the vapes die, and the orange wine starts flowing? In the spirit of The White Lotus, Whit Stillman, and obviously Lena Dunham’s Girls, BATHERS is a comedy of manners revamped for 2026. The play’s fresh-faced ensemble is all too familiar, as they debate Ozempic, lab-grown diamonds, and Punch the Monkey with equal fervor–anything to distract from their own miseries, which nonetheless leak out and wreak lakeside havoc. After a sold-out opening weekend, Rinehart-Jones took a crack at our Backstage questionnaire, revealing all the blood, sweat, and Glacial Freeze Gatorade that went into his second play.
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How did you first decide to write a play?
My first play LIFESTYLES was about a small town in Alaska where everyone lives in the same building. I brought up the idea to my friends, and they were like let’s do it—let’s make a play. We were just a group of friends but we realized we had this amazing confluence of skills that allowed us to put on a production at a scale that was really exciting to us—Nathan Ashany had the theater and set design know-how to stage an ambitious and dynamic show, Sarisha Kurup had the art and design skills to give the play a distinct visual world, and Ben, who is a union organizer by day, used that experience to help manage a sprawling production. We just wanted to be hanging out with each other and making something. Most of that original team stuck around for this one, including Nathan, Sarisha, Ben, and our amazing Production Coordinator Kaylie. And we added Madeline Donahue to our team this time around and she really brought a deep professional production background that allowed us to scale up since our first play. Together they could design and build a set, market the show, manage a large cast, and that helped a lot. I was able to focus a lot more. It was a shit ton of work, but I did it because I feel that I do have something to say. These are difficult times for young people, and I think more work hides from that than embraces it.
What is your writing process like? Where and when do you write?
I write very quickly and in bursts, like I’m going to piss my pants intellectually or something, almost always late at night, also like pissing. Drinking a lot of light blue gatorade. (GLACIAL FREEZE NOT COOL BLUE.) I write my plays with very few scene directions, and so I often listen to unedited streams of conversation in order to make things realistic. In this play, I actually listened to livestreams of city council and school board meetings, because I knew I wanted this vibe to sour but I didn’t quite want the audience to know why. Insofar as I have any goal for my plays, it’s for them to be highly specific moments in time—that’s all life is anyways. I don’t want them to last, that’s not what they are for.
How did you find this cast? What were the auditions like?
Some were instincts of mine, but most were the work of my fantastic Casting Director Violette, who worked with the ideas I already had and helped form lists of folks that could make the mosaic make sense. It’s really important that the characters feel like they could actually be friends, or have been friends, but different enough to help everyone keep track since there are so many characters. Violette is very good at understanding what I value in an actor, and so she did a lot of the work for me. We did a big round of auditions, and we got one of our actors that way. But I’m largely intuitive when it comes to casting and mostly offered the parts without seeing folks audition in the end.
How did the play change through the rehearsal process?
Against the advice of literally every single person I have ever met, I meet with every actor before I finish the script and take their notes and do a rewrite. There is no piece of dialogue or even a single component that’s more important than the right tone. It’s so obnoxious but I always tell the actors that I think of this less as a play and more of a song. It is about the passing of time, a feeling, if you’re feeling it. It’ll be okay. Once we were on set in the actual environment of the play, things really fell into place. Nathan, Ben, and Sarisha built us this maximalist set that transformed our basement theater into a lush outdoor landscape. Once we were playing on that set, we were able to really start developing the flow of the piece. The actors being able to step into the almost real world as their characters was key, and the show would not be anything without those key aspects coming together.
What’s your directorial style? How do you assert yourself?
As the actors will be the first to tell you, I’m pretty laissez-faire. It’s a soft touch. I find it fascinating that Directors are supposed to stand there and tell people what to do. In my experience, I must give that over to the actors to inhabit the characters completely. I always tell them, if you feel you must do something on stage, don’t wait for my permission. Going somewhere, saying something, changing anything, the actors must have this freedom. Which sounds great in principle, but actors like to be directed so I try to set up guideposts to where they are going. Instead of, “Do this like this,” I try to say something like “she’s really upset about this,” although in reality I’m sure it’s a mix of both. I saw a film sometime last year that had a big influence on my directing style, which is Matt and Mara by Kazik Radwanski. I believe that my work can only exist in that context. The script cannot be more important than the message or tone; and the actors must feel ownership of their work. I hope that as I grow in this, that I’m able to better articulate what I want from the art, but I sort of feel like a passenger to it. If I hold true to any rule, it’s that the actors must not know all the answers about the characters in the script, which might seem counterintuitive, but if you know everything you can’t find anything. You wouldn’t be a person, the thing real people wonder about the most is themselves, so if I give the actors all the answers, there’s nowhere for them to go. Someone called my style “hypercontemporary” to me the other day, and I liked that.
Were there any catastrophes?
If there weren’t catastrophes it wouldn’t be fun. God is good, and you can publish that.
Your characters feel so fully formed, even beyond what we see of them. How do you approach building a character and placing them in relation to others?
Well, the actors have a difficult task in this play because the experience, even intermission, is in real time. And so, it is hard to build a fully-formed character or provide necessary depth when you’re really only watching any given character for forty or so minutes of this play. I just tried to make them all have strengths and weaknesses, and I wanted them all to feel like in some way they were the odd person out. As I’ve gotten older I’ve started to think that everyone feels like the odd person out. Everyone has a reason to subconsciously prioritize their own feelings and uniqueness, and if you can open your well of empathy to every single one of those people then they can become full. These characters would not have their richness if it weren’t for the contributions of the actors, who have grounded them, embraced them and built them alongside me in every way.
Tell us about a formative theatrical experience.
The single most important theatrical experience of my life is when I was 16. At the time, I wasn’t really into film, I was into video games, and I did some theater, but I wouldn’t say I was into it. I was fucking around in my kitchen and my dad suggested I watched Dazed and Confused, which is still one of my favorite films. I sat on an uncomfortable stool and watched the whole thing on a Mac mini. And it wasn’t like a lightbulb went off and I thought, wow I could make art, that’s something I can do, that took ten more years, but it was a start. I also played the Scarecrow in a production of the Wizard of Oz when I was 14. And while not theatrical experiences always, my family, friends, and clients all make art that I admire deeply. I am nothing without them. I am just other people’s care, that’s the only way I got here.
Who do you most want to see in the audience, dead or alive?
Punch (the bullied monkey), Drake, Justin Bieber, Joan Didion, Kaia Gerber, and anyone else who might not have known they contributed to this play. Also, anyone who can give our team money for the next one. We’re here to stay. To date we’ve never not sold out a real show.
What do you hope people argue about on the way home?
I would like a couple to attend, have a fight about the content of the play, then forgive each other, have amazing passionate sex and then a wanted child. Hopefully that child gets a great public school education, and becomes a mathematician or a doctor and solves a big problem for us all. That would be the most ideal outcome, and not to worry because I foresee it as likely. I guess if I had to pick something specific; “When does someone become a grown up?”
What do you do after a show?
I take a long aimless walk, which is how I am able to think. Then probably call my girlfriend.
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