Showing @ Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Wed 3 – Sun 14 Aug
Multi-award winning theatre group TEAM [Theatre of the Emerging American Moment] are back in Edinburgh this year with their new show Mission Drift. After their 2005, 2006 and 2008 Fringe First triumphs, the New York based company return with their musical performance on the growth of American capitalism from the embryonic roots of 17th century Amsterdam. Following a young dutch couple in 1624, the TEAM track, map and investigate the pair’s journey to modern day Las Vegas, the now epicentre of the housing market crash, dissecting and probing the nature of western capitalism and its dominance. We caught up with Artistic Director Rachel Chavkin to talk about the group, the show and its content:
Could you tell us a little bit about how and why TEAM was set up?
Sure. So the TEAM was founded in 2004 by a group of 6 NYU alums. And we came together at that time oddly enough with the goal of bringing two shows to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. None of us had ever been before and in fact none of us had ever toured a show before, I mean we were wildly inexperienced and ignorant I can say! And we’d come together because I think all six of us, and I believe all the people who’ve joined the team (there’s thirteen of us in total) were excited by many different types of theatre but our freelance lives were leaving us not totally satisfied with the ability to meld our writer brains and devising brains to our politics world. So the TEAM was essentially a home that we could keep returning to: to make work that is sort of at the core of our existences in the country and in the world.
The mission of the company is to ‘dissect and celebrate the experience of living in America today’ – so there’s not an explicitly political agenda as part of that. There’s not a capital ‘p’ but I do think embedded in that mission there’s a lower case ‘p’ political in the sense that we want to be making work that takes elements from American history and American mythology and crash them into this current moment to try to understand how we got here and what’s going on. And I think there’s definitely something inherently political about that.
How did the show take form and what made you begin the story in 1624?
So Mission Drift is a new American musical and it was originally started with the intention of asking the question: what defines the character of American capitalism (specifically vs. capitalism anywhere else in the world)? And the TEAM writes everything as a collaborative (that’s one of the main aspects of the company); so over the course of the process which has been almost three years, we knew from the beginning that we were interested in looking at westerns but Las Vegas arose as a central idea and place to focus on. And that’s partially because Las Vegas was the fastest growing city in America at the turn of the millennium and is now at the epicentre of the housing crisis.
And in 1624 that was when the first boat of settlers came over from Amsterdam to New Amsterdam and I think the reason we settled on that was because early in the making of Mission Drift I had read a book called The Island at the Centre of the World by a historian named Russell Shorto and it’s this amazing history that basically says Americans are raised and told that are founding fathers were the puritans, were these British immigrants coming to America in search of religious freedom. And the argument that Shorto makes is that in fact that’s a part of our history but actually some of the things that most define America i.e. capitalism and multiculturalism are not due to the British ancestors but due to this little colony that no-one seems to remember in New Amsterdam. So when we were thinking about where our capitalist routes started, rather than with the puritans, it seemed clear that they started in these two immigrants who came here not for religious freedom but as employees; and they were employees of the first multinational corporation, the Dutch West India Company.
The music is composed by a TEAM associate named Heather Christian and I mention it because it functions in a very different way than music usually does in a musical. Rather than being characters breaking into song, the music in Mission Drift actually does very much what I hope the play does for the audience which is: the story is moving along and suddenly it opens outward into this massive poetic landscape where, if you think about the story like a train, the songs are these bubbles of ideas around the train as it’s passing through. And it’s this incredibly beautiful and challenging space to be inside, practically combining elements of southern blues and western ballads and gospel – it’s just enormously beautiful as a score.
How much is this show an investigation of modern day American capitalism and how much is it a critique of it?
It’s both, very much so. I think it’s important to note that while it is an investigation of capitalism it’s a very human and emotional story of a marriage – and a marriage that travels from total possibility to the end of the ties that bind these two people. As we think of it, the man in the couple represents capitalism and we think of the woman as more tied to the frontier. And I think ultimately the play critiques the idea that there is something inherently unreasonable and unsustainable about the marriage of these two things. And so yes it’s definitely both an investigation and a critique – but one of the most important things to the TEAM when we are making work is to not have an audience be able to leave and know exactly what our point of view is because that’s always felt too easy to us as a way of making political theatre. So it’s more about raising questions than offering answers.
And when we started the process it was May 2008 so it was before the financial crisis and once that happened when Lehman Brothers collapsed in September and everything followed, suddenly we were inundated with podcasts and television shows about the economy and suddenly everyone was becoming an expert on CDOs. And so we realised at that moment that the work we were going to make couldn’t be fact-based, didn’t want to be just a dry examination of what had happened. So what we instead moved to was a much more mythic landscape and that seemed to me a much more appropriate thing theatrically than a non-fiction dissection of the financial crisis.
But we start our plays so slowly. It takes us a long time to figure out the direction we’re going in, so I wouldn’t say we had to scrap anything. It did mean we had to be much more careful about how we were trying to answer the question. We were going initially towards westerns and cowboy movies and that remained part of it, but we realised that if we were going to talk about capitalism our focus really needed to be there and less on westerns explicitly.
Is this a left-wing political angle which is shared by the entire TEAM group?
That’s actually difficult to say. I know that the TEAM as a whole is quite progressive in its politics in terms of its individual members. But I don’t know that we agree on any specific analysis of what happened. I wouldn’t say we’re approaching this work with a left-wing agenda. Our hope is to always make work that people can see many different points of view in and that argument is core to the integrity of the piece.
Do you feel the global economic recession, and by extension, capitalism itself needs to be discussed more in art?
Probably, yes! I’m not sure I have a specific feeling about that actually! I think artists will always fight a losing battle if they set out to prove that they’re necessary, even during a recession, because inherent in that is the fear and the suspicion that they are not. But I do think a moment like this is an invitation to create contemporary and vital work that both creates space for people in the world to feel things in ways that they can’t feel in daily life; and also provide space through the performance to think critically about the contemporary world and I think that need is more urgent than ever at a moment like this absolutely.