In an ideal world, I'd have posted a
whole bunch of stuff on here during May: the 8000-word transcript of
my interview with Nature Theater of Oklahoma plus sort-of review of
Life and Times (at current rate of progress, that might just about be
finished in August); a thing on Gertrude Stein, Anthony Neilson's
Narrative and our incomprehensible minds (now light-pencilled for 2015) X. But this is not an ideal world.
Certainly not today: I could have written twice as much about the
Team as I did for the Guardian, and that was before two-thirds of
what I did write had to be cut to fit it on a single G2 page. Snip
snip snip. Time being short, I've had to abandon the idea of
rewriting it for here: what follows is just what I originally filed.
It's not a great piece by any means, but at least it's longer.
*
A lot of what you need to know about
American theatre company the Team can be discovered from the story of
how they got their name. At root it's quite a short story: the
founding group of six graduates from New York University called
themselves after their artistic director, Rachel Chavkin: “the
team” was her nickname. But the important bit is that their first
project together in 2004 was to treat the word as an acronym and
figure out what it stood for. The suggestions, Chavkin says, were
mostly ridiculous – but from them they settled on “Theatre of the
Emerging American Moment”. Chavkin adds: “We came up with our
name and our mission statement in the same breath.”
Although the company have quietly shed
the phrase over the past few months – understandably, it being
cumbersome and off-puttingly dry – the manifesto holds truer than
ever. In the UK they've been making their name with a series of works
that examine American culture, history, politics and mythology with
as much irreverence as fierce intelligence: first with Particularly in the Heartland (2006), which looked at neo-conservatism through the
lens of The Wizard of Oz; then with Architecting (2008), which
contemplated the legacy of the civil war and the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina via Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone With the Wind;
and now with Mission Drift, a musical about capitalism and the
pioneer spirit, which was a hit at the Edinburgh festival in 2011 and
opens at the National Theatre [this month].
That nutshell description does nothing
to convey the vibrancy, the sheer sexiness, of Mission Drift. In its
quest to understand how capitalism built America, it crosses
centuries and the entire continent, following Dutch immigrants Joris
and Catalina from New Amsterdam to the Nevada desert, marvelling as
they adapt to each new territory and new era. At the end of their
journey lies Las Vegas, where their story becomes entwined with that
of Chris and Joan, two people broken by the 21st-century financial
crisis. Overlooking them all is the sultry, snaky figure of Miss
Atomic, played by self-styled “avant-torch” singer HeatherChristian, whose husky songs help to narrate and comment on this
fast-moving tale.
With so much story and information
crammed in, it's no surprise that Mission Drift took years to put
together. Work on it began in 2008 with some intensive reading: “No
one in the company knew how capitalism or economics work – we're
all theatre people,” says Chavkin deprecatingly. So its 14 members
were each assigned an area of study, ranging from the history of Wall
Street to the writings of key economists including John Maynard
Keynes and Milton Friedman, which they would later present to each
other, helping to build what Chavkin calls “a collective
unconscious”.
Absorbing the ideas was the easy part:
the difficulty lay in trying to express them emotionally. “These
concepts are fascinating because they govern lives,” says Brian
Hastert, a Team founder who plays Joris. “So that was the quest:
how do we make this human?” Through a series of improvisation and
writing sessions – all the Team's work is scripted collaboratively
– myriad characters and possible scenarios emerged and were
discarded. Among the abandoned material are scenes full of galloping
horses and talking lizards, and a long story about two investment
bankers on a violent crime spree. Even Joris and Catalina were killed
off for several months: “The performers had felt really icky about
playing period characters – it was like a Disney musical,”
explains Chavkin.
Their first breakthrough came in summer
2010, when the company decamped to Las Vegas for a month of research
and development. The experience was eye-opening: “Everything
degenerate that you can think of, you have the freedom to do in Las
Vegas without judgment,” says Christian, whose character Miss
Atomic represents the heart of Vegas in the production. Hastert
admits: “There's a list of things I had not done before that trip.
You want them? I'd never been to a strip club – I was a Nebraskan
boy! – I'd never gambled, I had never smoked pot, I had never been
inside a casino: check, check, check, check.” The advantage of
staying for an extended period, says Christian, is that: “You get
it out of your system – then you can watch other people have this
revelation.”
The debauchery in Vegas heightened
their appreciation of the excitement of capitalism – what Hastert
calls “the extraordinary passion of the desire for growth” –
but more contemplative encounters with people who had grown up in the
city also helped them understand its costs. One of the houses they
rented there had been lost by its owners when their mortgage was
foreclosed. And it's a generally accepted fact in the city that
within a generation or two it will run out of water. “There's an
easy metaphor of Las Vegas as a manifestation of greed,” says
Chavkin. “But that's much less interesting to me than what we found
out: that Las Vegas is a boom town that grew too fast, because all
these resources went into it very suddenly. It's really a metaphor
for human sustainability, and the larger thing that's happening with
America being so slow to come to the table of environmental
sustainability.”
Libby King, who plays Catalina in
Mission Drift, admits that as the impact of the financial crash began
to be felt in 2008, with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, few members
of the Team (now expanded to a core group of 13, plus several
associates) felt personally affected. “Most of us live hand to
mouth: we don't save anything, we don't invest anything, so the idea
of a financial crisis – other than funding drying up – was kind
of a far-fetched one. At least I understand it now.” She was also
struck by how quickly trust in the system was restored. Christian
hopes that: “To a certain extent, we're more responsible as a
nation. People are a little more realistic about what they can
afford.” It comes down, she argues, to the American Dream: “This
nebulous idea that you can live in a house with a pool and granite
worktops and stainless steel appliances – and all those houses look
the same because everybody's dream looks the same.” It is this
nebulous idea that the Team are focused on dismantling.
And yet, argues Hastert, they all feel
“very patriotic: we kind of love America”. Which is why it hit
hard that performances of Mission Drift in New York earlier this year
were received much less positively than elsewhere in the world.
Charles Isherwood, writing in the New York Times, found: “its ideas
about the destructive force of American capitalism … belabored to
the point of tedium”. Whereas, says Hastert, in countries still in
the thick of financial crisis, such as Portugal, “people were eager
to talk to us about the ideas after the show”.
The company have continued to work on
Mission Drift since that New York run – it now has an interval, and
Christian says the character of Miss Atomic is clearer – so it
should feel different even to people who saw it in Edinburgh 18
months ago. At the same time, they're working on multiple other
projects, notably RoosevElvis, which interlaces the stories of
Theodore Roosevelt and Elvis Presley to examine the making of
American myths, and so the making of Americans; and Primer for a
Failed Superpower, which is attempting to frame America's shifting
position as a world power within 1980s post-punk music.
Christian, as an associate rather than
core member of the Team, offers an intriguing outsider's perspective
on their accumulating body of work: “They've been together almost
10 years, the kind of Americans that they are and their relationship
to the country changes the older they get. Particularly in the
Heartland was about feeling displaced in New York City; Architecting
was about relationships and romantic views of America; with Mission
Drift, all of us had just turned 30, entering the age of being an
adult, and thinking about the span of a life, how you sustain that
logistically, and reconcile that to the hunger you feel as an
American to keep going forward.” Now one of their members is about
to become a parent – so Primer for a Failed Superpower, says King,
“is us thinking about our children”.
Hastert, though, has a more
dispassionate take on the Team's sources of inspiration. “If you
want to make plays about the American soul, the American spirit, you
will never run dry. There is always some craziness, because it is a
big, nutball place.”
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