New York's TEAM (Theater of theEmerging American Moment), directed by Rachel Chavkin, bring an incrediblecombination of energy and talent to their plays, not only to entertain, but witha determination that their shows have something to say. This piece, apresentation of P.S. 122's Coil Festival, is about American capitalism and thegreat recession.  It is receivingits New York premiere, after three years of collaboration and a successful Europeanrun, where it won a 2011 Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Festival.  I spoke with Chavkin.

 

HiRachel.  You and the TEAM have atrademark of making your pieces out of an extended workshop and researchprocess.  And here you started inAugust, 2008, even before the financial crisis hit.

 It was born out of our earlier show, Architecting, for which we readNaomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine, and that book talks about this ideaof "Disaster Capitalism"; and that led me to ask the TEAM how they defined"American capitalism," specifically. That was our core starting point. Another core came from Jake Margolin, one of our co-members.  He had become obsessed with westerns;not just movies, but western style pulp fiction, like Zane Grey and Louis Lamour.  So that was the other starting nugget.

And then the financial crisis happened.  Lehman Brothers fell; and we realizedthat we couldn't make a documentary. I don't think the TEAM ever would have made a documentary play,regardless.  But we knew we couldn'tdo that for this play, because there were so many radio and TV programs andbooks already explaining the crisis.

Then, sometimein the spring of 2009, Jake brought up Las Vegas, and the decision was made tolook at Las Vegas, which was the fastest growing city in America at the time ofthe millennium, but it had been ravaged by the financial crisis.  I became fixated on going to LasVegas.  In June, 2010, we movedthere for a month.  It wasextraordinary.  We would do what Icalled "a field trip" every morning there.

What wasthat like?

We went toa 60-year-old pig farm in North Vegas, where the mobsters allegedly fed theirvictims to the pigs. Now this pigfarm is in a controversy because developers built new homes 30 feet from the sites,assuming they could buy out the pig farm, but the pig farm didn't sellout.  We visited this developmentin 105 degree heat.  There arebrand-new, way-too-large gated community houses that stand 30 feet from a pigfarm.  That's sort of what we foundagain and again on our filed trips.

The one other piece of background is that I read a book, The Island at The Center of the World by historian Russell Shorto.  It's about the New Amsterdam colony andthe Dutch settling of America.  Itmade us realize that many of the roots we associate with modern Americacapitalism are, in fact, from the Dutch founding colonies, and not the British.The Dutch were here to make money, and the New Netherlands were a commercialcolony.

And theshow we're going to see?

The show isconstructed of two interweaving love stories.  One is this sort of epic romance saga, these two 14-year-oldDutch kids, Catalina and Joris. They're based on the Dutch Adam and Eve.  We've stolen their names and created a story about them.  These two kids come to New Amsterdam in1624, and then you watch something unlock in their DNA; and they decide tostay, and head west, and that gains them immortality; they are capitalist godsracing across the country.

The second story is a real intimate one, of acocktail waitress, Joan, who has lost her job during the financialcrisis in Las Vegas.  What you cometo realize is that's she works for the modern-day Catalina and Joris, who arereal estate tycoons in Las Vegas. She falls in love with a man living out on the desert in his familyhome, and he's lost his home to the city of Las Vegas for his well water, andhe invites Joan to move with him to Montana.

These are the two stories that are told, and held together, bythe incredibly beautiful musical score written by Heather Christian, who alsoplays Miss Atomic, a narrator.  Hercharacter was inspired by the 1950 beauty pageants in Las Vegas, that they heldto celebrate the A-bomb. On one of our field trips we went to the AtomicTesting Museum; they were detonating atomic bombs 60 miles north of the city.

The Connelly Theater, 220 E. 4^th St.,(212) 352-3101. Jan 8-29. $25/$20.