Having been born in Washington D.C. to two civil rights lawyers, one could have easily expected Rachel Chavkin to take the criminal justice career route. But instead her path led her to New York, where she has established a career as one of the most innovative and exciting directors to hit Broadway.
Chavkin grew up in a suburb of Washington D.C., playing a lot of soccer and, later, seeing a lot of theater. At age 11, she began attending a summer theater camp called Stagedoor Manor. Though she acknowledges that some things about the camp were problematic, she loved the sense of camaraderie and teamwork that she experienced there. She talks often about her sense of a “shared fate” with regard to stage productions. Her passion for theater really kicked in, however, at age 16 when she saw an avante-garde, immersive version of the musical Hair. At that point, she knew this was the direction she wanted to go.
Chavkin began attending NYU in 2003 to study directing and acting. She took advantage of the fact that she was living in New York and saw as many shows as possible, often attending and/or ushering for shows 5-6 nights a week, a practice she maintains now when she’s not directing a production. The performances she was most taken by were being put on by experimental theater troupes. She saw through these productions what theater could look like, how different it could be from the traditional productions that most people thought of.
While at NYU, she started producing her own work, and eventually assembled a group of her classmates to work on a piece that she submitted to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a massive arts and cultural event held annually in Scotland. The piece involved multiple types of media, and it was awarded with a Fringe First Award. She named this group of performers The TEAM, and eventually built it into an established theater ensemble in Brooklyn. The TEAM is a non-profit group that works collaboratively to create “new work about the contemporary American experience”. Chavkin still works as the ensemble’s artistic director. Their productions have toured both nationally and internationally.
Thinking that she’d like to work as a professor of theater, she pursued her MFA in Theater Direction from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She continued producing her own work during this time, both with The TEAM and through Columbia. She continued to explore this idea of very sensory-driven, immersive theater.
“I love mess, mistakes, the fragility of live performance. I try to build productions that feel on the edge of spiraling into chaos at any moment, though in fact my work is profoundly controlled.”
Rachel Chavkin
One of Chavkin’s most frequent collaborators is actor and composer Dave Malloy. The two have worked on multiple productions together, often with very unexpected subject matter and an avante-garde, immersive feel to them. The most notable collaboration between the two was Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, a musical written by Malloy based on a 70-page section of the novel War and Peace. The show developed over several years, starting on a small scale in a tent, and eventually blooming into a full Broadway production which ran at the Imperial Theatre from November 2016 to September 2017. The production involved on-stage audience seating, with actors weaving their way amongst theater patrons, even starting the show by passing out pierogies. It led the Tony nominations in 2017 with 12 in all, including a nomination for Chavkin as Best Director.
Little did Rachel Chavkin know that this production, back before it ever reached Broadway, would lead to an incredibly important partnership. In 2012, folk singer-songwriter Anais Mitchell attended a performance of Great Comet and was blown away by the production. She approached Chavkin about directing and helping her develop a concept album she had written into a musical. The two worked together for several years on the project and eventually created the musical version of Hadestown. Hadestown is a modern retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in this case in a stylized version of New Orleans. The musical was widely praised, and once again, Chavkin found herself at the helm of a musical that led the Tony Award nominations, this time with 14 nominations total. And this time, at the 2019 Tony Awards, Chavkin would take home the award for Best Direction of a Musical, becoming just the fourth female director to do so. This fact was not lost on her. During her acceptance speech, she shared these words:
“There are so many women who are ready to go. There are so many artists of color who are ready to go. And we need to see that racial diversity and gender diversity reflected in our critical establishment, too.”
Rachel Chavkin
This moment in her speech gives a great deal of insight into who Chavkin is as a person and as a director. She is a deep believer that the arts, theater in particular, can be an agent for social change. She is deeply committed to diversity, not only in the types of work that she produces but with regard to the people involved in it. Another production with Malloy, a musical adaptation of Moby-Dick that went up in Boston in late 2019, consisted of a cast of all minority actors, with the exception of one character, similar to the production of Hamilton. Chavkin has been described as someone who “looks around the room to see who’s missing”, then endeavors to bring those people into the process.
It seems unlikely that Rachel Chavkin will be slowing down any time soon. With multiple potential projects in her mind at any given time, including a possible adaptation of Auntie Mame and a TV documentary series about the impact of the local community center on lower and middle class neighborhoods, we’re likely to continue to hear Chavkin’s name for many years to come.
https://www.americantheatre.org/2015/09/18/rachel-chavkins-great-comet-of-a-career/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/theater/rachel-chavkin-hadestown-great-comet.html
https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/high-art-high-ideals-rachel-chavkin-takes-broadway
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