The most important course of Tisch alum Rachel Chavkin’s life took place from 7-10 p.m. every Sunday night. In that experimental theater class at NYU, titled “Creating Original Work,” Chavkin started to produce unique art and catalyzed her career as a performing arts director.
Chavkin has directed several Broadway musicals, including the critically-acclaimed “Hadestown” — which took home eight Tony Awards and stands as the highest-grossing musical at the Walter Kerr Theatre in Midtown. Beyond Broadway, Chavkin is recognized worldwide for performances that often put a theatrical spin on historical narratives.
In an interview with WSN, Chavkin discussed her directing process, forming a theater collective and dealing with creative uncertainty.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WSN: How did you find your passion for directing?
Chavkin: Both of my folks are big believers in the arts as a wing of social justice, so I grew up in a very art-reverential household. I went to a summer theater camp that I have mixed feelings about, but I certainly would not be in theater without it. I really fell madly in love with it as a practice, and that was how I started doing theater. I was always bossy, so directing certainly became a part of that — I acted and directed all through school, and I really loved performance for a period of time.
Chavkin said that she decided to attend Tisch’s Playwrights Horizons Theater School once she learned about the program’s focus on directing and acting. During her junior year, Chavkin collaborated with five of her classmates to create a show that explored how white writers appropriated the work of Black artists. Two years after she graduated from NYU in 2002, the six NYU alumni founded a theater collective called The Theatre of the Emerging American Movement. As the founding artistic director of the organization, Chavkin helps direct and co-write the collective’s plays.
Since The TEAM came together, the collective has created and performed 12 works exploring themes in U.S. history, from slavery’s impact on contemporary racial tensions to the role of masculinity in American culture. At the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest festival of performing arts, the group won a Fringe First — one of the festival’s most esteemed prizes for new works.
After graduating from NYU, Chavkin went to her first professional audition and quickly decided that acting was not for her. After working with The TEAM for several years, she directed “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” — a Tony-nominated musical based on a segment of Leo Tolstoy’s novel “War and Peace” — which was on Broadway from November 2016 to September 2017. Chavkin then collaborated with playwright Anaïs Mitchell to create and direct “Hadestown,” a love story based on two Greek mythology tales that premiered on Broadway in April 2019.
At the 2019 Tony Awards, “Hadestown” won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre. Chavkin, who won Best Direction of a Musical for her work, was the only nominated woman directing a Broadway musical that season, noting the lack of gender and racial diversity within the industry in her speech.
WSN: What draws you to specific projects?
Chavkin: Art can help open and change the shape of your brain, altering the shape of how you understand the way the world works. I am drawn to work that changes how my mind understands the world, and I consider a big part of my practice as a director to be trying to be a surrogate for the audience. I think, ‘What do I want to see?’ and then hope that some of the audience will share my taste in terms of what I’m curious about or interested in. I am hungry for work that works on me.
When beginning to direct a new show, Chavkin said that she works with librarians to explore the New York Public Library’s extensive historical picture collection to research various aspects of her upcoming work. She said that this practice allows her to consider her artistic ideas in greater depth than an algorithmic search engine would.
Most recently, Chavkin directed the musical “Lempicka,” inspired by the life of the Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka in the 20th century. The show opened on Broadway on April 14 and closed on May 19.
WSN: How did directing Lempicka challenge you and change your perspective?
Chavkin: It changed how I think about physical intimacy, sex and embodiment on stage. I don’t know that we did it as fully as we could, but it was something that we were stretching towards. In terms of how audiences experienced it, there was something about a woman’s journey at the center that I was shocked needed more explanation. I didn’t fully understand how much I’d have to do that work, how much the piece needed to do that work, so that’s a lesson that I have left that piece haunted by.
Chavkin is currently working on co-directing a play called “Reconstructing (Still Working but the Devil Might Be Inside)” with The TEAM and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. For the show, she said that she is stepping back into acting and taking on a small role — which she described as “disorienting, but not unpleasant.”
WSN: At this stage of your career, how do you cope with the uncertainty of directing as compared to when you started in the industry?
Chavkin: There’s never less uncertainty at all. What I have found has changed for me is my degree of comfort with uncertainty. I have become more at ease with trusting time and that discomfort will pass, even if there’s a lot of it. It would actually be criminal and fraudulent of me if I implied that there was one way to direct a play. You can’t make a better choice until you make a choice. We have to start by making a series of choices, even if those then change over the course of the production radically.
Contact Rory Lustberg at rlustberg@nyunews.com.