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hit right in the feels

saw such a great show tonight.

Interview on The Bushwick Starr's Rooftop with Director Rachel Chavkin

What is your background and experience as a theatre artist?

I went to NYU undergrad and after graduating I assistant directed for a couple years, about a year and a half maybe? I assisted Annie Kauffman, which was a delight…I also began working on a lot of Shakespeare. While I was in school I had also begun doing a fair amount of post modern dance improvisation. I was really compelled by the Viewpoints training I did with acolytes of the SITI Company, and then the SITI Company itself. It kind of blew my mind at the time I encountered it.

I had devised my first show while in college as a third year student, an adaptation of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl.Ifused the poem with a bunch of writing on jazz and bebop and how Ginsberg’s and his colleagues’ writing was evolving as jazz was evolving in that moment. I had loved that experience.

So with a couple friends from college a few years out of school, I founded The TEAM. We didn’t actually start out to make a company—the intention was to make two shows and bring them to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which I had never been to, none of us had ever been to. We had never worked internationally; we certainly didn’t know what we were doing. But, we were energized by the thought of going and making something.

The TEAM took off kind of like a lightning bolt at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which is partially the nature of the festival because it’s such a concentrated period of energy. So something can really jump-start. Everything in The TEAM’s career can be traced back to that initial summer in Edinburgh.

...and then I do freelance work as well.

What made you all want to create your own company and your own work?

I think that goes back to having a desire to claim authorship over what you are doing. Individually we weren’t fully satisfied by the work we were doing in the world (granted we were also a year and half out of college, and part of that is natural restlessness and part of it is arrogance).

The work I look for most now as the TEAM’s director, and the writing that I jump for as a freelance director, is writing that merges human stories with the epic, the political, the social, the historical, and the philosophical. The TEAM often have disagreements about what we respond to aesthetically; Kristen and I always joke about the fact that if she loves something I’ll hate it and vice versa. So there isn’t necessarily a homogeny to the work we respond to, but I think that all of us are looking for a production that is larger than something that can fit into a sitcom or that would be better served by making a realistic film.

Why RoosevElvis and taking these two masculine male figures to be in this show? And in addition to that what has been your process for creating this show?

RoosevElvis almost started by accident. It’s very common that one of our works will grow out of a previous work. During Architecting, Kristen had tried valiantly to write Teddy Roosevelt into the show, and for a number of reasons that never happened. I knew that she had this continuing obsession with Teddy Roosevelt, and had said at some point we should make a solo show for her to play Teddy, her response to which was “I hate solo shows.” So that had been incubating for a long period of time but going no particular place.

And in 2010, Libby and I were in Las Vegas researching Mission Drift and came across an Elvis impersonator who was just extraordinary. His name was either Big Elvis or Fat Elvis. He is an enormous guy, who actually at that time was losing weight, and he had a 3pm, 5pm, and 7pm show on the Strip. That got Libby into YouTubing all these different Elvis clips; we would watch them with our jaws agape and I said we should make a show about Elvis. I was talking to Taylor Mac about what the company was working on around that time, and I told him that we had these two sort of small side project ideas. And it was Taylor actually that combined them and said, off the cuff, “two women in fat suits.” And that’s kind of how RoosevElvis was born.

Something that we both immediately thought about and put out of our minds was why put them together. I had no trouble wrapping my brain around why women should play these two men. I often have cross-gendered casting in my work; I love doing it in part because I am a women and so many classical plays are written for largely male characters. Libby played Astrov in my Uncle Vanya and she was astonishing. I love to see women in those roles. I think it brings in a whole slew of shades and emotional life that may be asleep if a man is playing them.

The TEAM has always done a lot of writing on our feet—I don’t like the word improvisation—building the characters and letting them talk for a long period of time. We did a lot of that on this show actually, more then I think we have ever done. I remember one of our first days Kristen and Libby just put on their costumes and were looking at each other in the mirror and peaking at each other and just playing. It was profoundly compelling in the way that early gentle process is. Jake Margolin, who is my Associate Director on the show, also did a ton of writing that he would bring into the room; then the ladies would write on their feet using the themes as a jumping off point.

One thing that came up during the process was that Libby was much more interested in Elvis impersonators than Elvis himself; the idea of someone who is a nobody living their life through a somebody. So the character Anne, who has ended up being the emotional spine of the piece, came out of that.

We had also determined that there would be a pilgrimage from the Badlands in South Dakota, where Anne works at a meat processing plant, to Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee. So in July, Libby, Kristen, Kevin Hourigan (our Assistant Director) Andrew Schneider (a really extraordinary artist), and I all went to Rapid City, South Dakota and rented an RV and did the pilgrimage. Andrew shot the entire time and the ladies were in character for almost the entire time. Those were 16, 18, 20 hour days including traveling. That footage is both being used in the show and we are making these great pieces of film that will stand outside the show as well.

What is the nature of collaboration for The TEAM? What does it take to be a successful collaborator?

The nature of collaboration for The TEAM is a lot of patience. Patience to have the same conversation again and again and again because people change, their points of view change, their ability to articulate why they feel strongly about something changes. And The TEAM’s process is profoundly democratic. On a day-to-day administrative level the company is run by Manda Martin, our Producing Director, and myself. But in the artistic room I almost never make lateral decisions; for the most part we are consensus driven. We all might write a version of a theme, and then read all those versions and discuss why one works. I often am then going home and trying to synthesize all the different visions while still trying to bring my own sense of logic as a writer and as a dramaturg so that we are not ending up with a collage. I don’t think any of us are interested in making a collage; we are interested in finding some logic, if not linear logic, for how the story is unfolding.

What is the dramaturgical process for The TEAM?

For us, there is a ton of research. Kristen has read a ton of books about Teddy Roosevelt, as have I. Libby has read the Peter Guralnick books on Elvis. It’s nice knowing that a choice is consistent even if the audience doesn’t know how or why. We don’t necessarily have a formal interest in sharing all that research with an audience, but we try to find a balance between that and how much an audience needs to know to invest in a given choice that we are making. We open RoosevElvis with the two men sort of giving glimpses into their lives because it felt like there was some base level of knowledge that the audience needed know from the start.

I always think of dramaturgy as a muscle. In grad school, Brian Kulick (who was one of my main teachers and an extraordinary brain) talked about dramaturgy in terms of thermodynamics, a sort of physics. It’s not a dry exercise in research or necessarily play structure, it is an emotional thing; how are we navigating from beat to beat. Especially if it’s not in real, linear time, there still must be a logic of some emotional life that we are tracing.

What is it like to direct, devise, and produce your own work? How do you switch between those hats?

It helps to have help. I didn’t have help for the first number of years with the day to day nitty-gritty. And, there remains in the office a bag known as the “cat lady bag” filled with the receipts from the first four years of the company’s life because I am very petrified dealing with money and that kind of fiscal responsibility. I am good at drawing up budgets, but accounting or anything terrifies me. Having Manda our Producing Director come on board this January has changed mine and our lives; it’s the first full time staff member we’ve had, and it took us 8 ½ years to get there.

The main hats that the company have to switch between are actually the hardest. Being a writer/generator and then also an actor or director; switching from rehearsing something to writing something. I have worked a lot on new plays as a freelance director, and it is so easy to address a problem in writing that actually wants to be addressed in performance and through rehearsal. Being able to identify the difference is really slippery in a new play process. When we were younger our default was just to rewrite it, but now it’s more of a process of taking the play as is and seeing how much might already be contained.

Do you have a dream project you would like to work on?

I have a million. One of The TEAM’s next shows, Primer for a Failed Superpower, is going to be this massive piece about the evolution of America’s superpower status, and our sense as citizens of our role in the world. There will be 7 TEAM performers, 7 teenagers, and 7 retirees all engaged in that conversation. This ensemble will form a multi-generational cover band, and the whole event will be strung together with cover songs. All of the music will have been written from a place of outrage about what America is doing at any given moment: from Woody Guthrie to Public Enemy to Minor Threat, and running the gamut hopefully. That’s a big project that’s a few years out from premiere, so that’s a dream project right now.

Are there any other shows that you are working on now that are already playing or coming up that you would like to share with our audience?

Primer is one. We are also in the early stages of working on a piece with Taylor Mac. Right now RoosevElvis is our main focus, though we are also trying to get Mission Drift, our last work, to perform on the west coast.

#RoosevElvis #newwork #Elivs #TheodoreRoosevelt #thebushwickstarr #theatre #brooklyn #Bushwick