Tony Award winner Rachel Chavkin illuminates career path for Rowan theatre majors

Rowan’s College of the Arts hosted Tony Award winner Rachel Chavkin for an evening conversation with Department of Theatre & Dance chair Lane Savadove on March 27. Chavkin shared insights from her twenty-plus-year career as a theatre maker, company founder and freelance director.

Chavkin, best known for directing the Broadway musical “Hadestown”— for which she won a Tony Award in 2019 — launched her career by co-founding the TEAM, a Brooklyn-based theatre company that has created and toured 12 original works.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Chavkin revealed a wealth of insights about pursuing a career in theatre, touching on her early introduction to the art form by her father, her growth as an artist at NYU, and her early years building a theatre company while juggling multiple day jobs.

Experimental mentors

Fundamental to Chavkin’s development as an artist was her experience seeing ensemble-based work by innovative theatre companies. 

“Most of my greatest mentors I’ve never met,” she said. “It was just about the consuming of their work.”

She named The Wooster Group, Elevator Repair Service, and Pig Iron Theatre Company among her influences, acknowledging Pig Iron Co-founder and Rowan MFA devised theatre Director Quinn Bauriedel in the audience. 

Chavkin described her scrappy and tenacious launch into co-founding the TEAM after college, whose consensus-driven writing process was the subject of a feature-length documentary and whose work has earned four “Scotsman” Fringe First Awards at Edinburgh Fringe and a Drama League Award for Outstanding Musical.

“The TEAM’s process is aggressively inefficient,” she said with pride. “Individuals bring their tastes, and those tastes are often irreconcilable … the TEAM room is a leap into a consistent faith in democracy.”

Collaborative creation leads to Broadway

Chavkin also detailed her creative process as a freelance director, emphasizing the importance of finding collaborators who share your excitement and creative vision. One such collaborator was composer Dave Malloy, who casually pitched her a musical based on a single section of Tolstoy's "War and Peace." Chavkin signed on, and the project became the breakout hit "Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812," a landmark production with a first-of-its-kind Broadway set (designed by MacArthur Genius Mimi Lien) that earned 12 Tony nominations in 2017. Composer-lyricist Anaïs Mitchell saw that production and reached out to Chavkin about bringing her folk opera album "Hadestown" to the stage.

Chavkin described her first meeting with Mitchell during which she relayed her vision for swinging light fixtures and secured her role as director of the project, “And we were off to the races.”  

Not advice, but insights

In a rapid-fire question segment led by Savadove, Chavkin revealed what makes her a great director ("I'm so bossy"), what she's insecure about ("I tend to make things overcomplicated — especially in staging"), and how she knows when a work is finished ("It's not. It's never finished. Rehearsal just has to stop.")

Towards the end of the evening, Chavkin took several questions from the audience. A leader from Do It Big Productions, which produced “Hadestown: Teen Edition” back in October asked for advice on producing youth productions. A number of youth performers attended the show in their “Hadestown” t-shirts.

 “I don’t have any advice,” Chavkin said admiringly. “You’re an expert on what you do.”

Chavkin spent over 30 minutes answering questions, covering everything from the logistics of taking a show to Edinburgh Fringe (“That’s where I put all of my money from my five jobs.”) to the nuances of communicating a director’s vision to the performers and design team. Rowan students in the audience engaged with enthusiasm and gratitude.

“[To hear from] somebody who has been there and struggled to get where she is now, but is so successful, is very inspiring,” said theatre major Kennedy Smith. “I had a really great time talking with her today and I am very grateful that my school [gave] this opportunity to speak with her.”

A master class with Rachel Chavkin

The evening event was preceded by a full day of master classes taught by Chavkin: one with graduate MFA students at Pig Iron Studios in Philadelphia and one with undergraduate theatre & dance majors on campus in Glassboro.

The master classes gave students a window into Chavkin's directorial process through text-based scene study incorporating techniques drawn from devised theatre. Working from her prompts, students rehearsed and performed excerpts from Caryl Churchill's "Light Shining in Buckinghamshire," then received feedback from Chavkin and their peers.

“Don’t tell me what you like,” she prompted the group. “What had meaning?”

"An Evening with Rachel Chavkin" is part of a new Visiting Artist program for the College of the Arts’ Department of Theatre & Dance, created with generous support from Joe and Kim Falkenstein.