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- [00:00]
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Foreign.
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Hi, I'm Lauren Klasschneider with Class Notes for Broadway Radio. I'm here with Rachel Chavkin, director of My Joy is Heavy at the New York Theatre Workshop.
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Hello.
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Hi. Well, thank you for being here so we can talk about this raucous, funny and tender indie film folk punk show about grief and healing. The Bengsons, Sean and Abigail are the creators and performers and of course, a real life married couple with extraordinary talent. What brought you all to each other?
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The Banksons, Abigail and Sean and I have been collaborating for many years now. Actually our first, we met when they were still in San Francisco and I heard a lot about them from colleagues. But our first collaboration was back In I think 20, 20, 14, 2015, on an incredible adaptation of Iphigenia that Anne Washburn wrote. And they both composed the music for the choral sections and were the lead singer, musician, performers of the Greek Chorus in that show. And then we went on to collaborate on a number of projects. And so when they asked me if I wanted to help them expand the short film that they had made during the Pandemic into a full length theater show, I, I really. It was. I didn't have to think twice about it.
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B
So that piece that you were referring to was a commission with the arena and it was a short piece. What did you see in it that let you know there was a more there there and you wanted to be
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a part of it? Well, first of all, you. Some basic descriptions of Abigail and Sean's music at the beginning, I will just add, like, their music is so emotional, so often fierce, incredibly tender. Their music is just extraordinary, broadly speaking. And then this piece specifically, both the incredibly personal nature of the story that they are telling, actually, you know, always funnily, ironically, the more specific the story is, somehow I often find the more universal it becomes. And so there is. I'm someone who lives with grief in very close, quite daily proximity. And I just find that holding the joy of my life and the sorrows of it in kind of even hands in community, I find this piece is like such a home for that and certainly like that's really the central thesis of the show as far as Abigail and Sean are concerned, is this idea that through community we are able to help carry our weight together
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in having such a long working relationship and I'm guessing friend and social relationship. How do you navigate the balance between them as creators and performance and you as director throughout the process?
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Yeah, I mean, one of my favorite. I love directing and thinking about the scenic construct for a Work. I tend to think about space first and foremost when making something and lead Jelinek, our astonishing set designer, he actually has his own deeply emotional relationship to this story and the short film from the Pandemic and the EP that went along with it. And I think Lee, I've heard him say, you know, kind of saved his life in many ways as he was dealing with his own issues of illness, but kind of backing up, like, part of my joy is the more kind of purely directing work, and part of it is dramaturgy. And so Abigail and Sean, you know, wrote every word of this, but I loved bouncing jokes between us together as well as, you know, helping them to think about structuring it. And there was one. About a year and a half into the development process for the show, there was one moment where we really began to ask whether to of the climactic songs were in the right order in the last quarter of the show. And it led to really unlocking the whole structure. And that's the kind of stuff that I just live for as someone who spends a lot of my life developing new and formally adventurous new work and particularly new musicals. So, yeah, it's really a pleasure.
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Well, you've also directed two of my favorite musicals that I've gotten to see. Downtown and Uptown, Hadestown and Natasha Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. How does your previous work inform the work on something new, or does it?
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Yeah, it's a lovely question. I mean, I have certainly put in my proverbial 10,000 hours and then some. I think part of actually not. I think really the central joy of my profession, professional life, for me, is it's eclecticism. And so I think I'm simultaneously always bringing, you know, information about how things have worked before on stuff I've worked on, while at the same time I am most drawn to work on pieces that I don't recognize and that are actually trying to behave in a totally different way so that I keep growing because I think learning is, like, one of my favorite activities. I love reading about shit I don't know and trying to wrap my brain around new ideas. So hopefully it's a good combo of, like, experience, but also genuine naivete about how a piece, you know what a piece is trying to become.
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You've had a long and wonderful history at the New York Theatre Workshop. Talk about creating new musicals there. And why is that a good and special place?
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Yeah, I mean, I have had the great fortune to work on a variety of pieces at New York Theatre Workshop.
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A.
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It's My favorite physical space in the world. Truly. I find the theater so delicious in terms of its physical presence. And it's, you know, it has scope so you can dream big, but it's still so intimate. And I've done, I did a Carol Churchill play there. That's actually probably one of my favorite things I've ever directed. I did a kind of very wild play with music called Three Pianos. That was one of my first collaborations with Dave Malloy as well as Rick Burkhardt and Alec Duffy. And then, and then now I've, I've done these two, you know, clear musical pieces, Hadestown and My Joy is Heavy. And I think the thing the workshop does so frankly, singularly is like me, they don't assume they know how to produce a new work. They are led by asking the artist questions to sort of really figure out how does this piece need to come into the world. And, and so for My Joyous, Heavy, very early on we had conversations about what I thought the set looked like, how it would function. And then from there they have been incredibly values aligned. Abigail and Sean both identify as disabled artists. And so the workshop has been unfailing in terms of centering access through the production as well, both for supporting our artists, but also ultimately supporting audiences of all disabilities abilities as well as temporarily able bodied folks to come see the show and experience it to the fullest. NYTW is just, you know, I'm very biased to it because it's been such a good home to me, but I think it's one of the best.
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Your other collaborators on the show, Steph Paul is the choreographer and or Matias is the musical supervisor. We talk about the collaboration among the group of you as artists.
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Yeah, I mean it really has felt like such a family affair. And Steph and I actually did an interview earlier this week where she was like, you know, that word family gets thrown around a lot in our industry often actually as a way of she has experience taking advantage of people and potentially implying a sort of false sense of solidarity, but for this. Not just because Abigail and Sean are a husband and wife, not just because we have, the three of us have such a long history, but like Steph was working with the Banksons when the world shut down in March 2020. That's how on a project that in Louisville, that was how they'd met. And so they had really been in the trenches together of panic in some of the heaviest times. And then separately, Steph and I, during the Pandemic, got to know each other for a project that she and I co directed with the incredible playwright Liliana Padilla. And the three of us spent hours and hours and hours together via Zoom and then in person preparing to direct that piece in a dynamic and equitable and, you know, exciting fashion that allowed kind of each of our superpowers as three very different artists to shine. And we worked with a leadership coach who Liliana originally had connected me with and then I'd been working with her and her name's Sheena Wadawan and she's just one of the most brilliant humans I know. And so Steph and I bring in an incredibly long history of partnership together and then or the same or was the music director on Great Comet. And so he and I have also been. So it's just there's a lot of depth of relationships and we're all adults and we all have family in very, very deep ways outside us. And we bring that into the room either as parents or as auntie and sisters. So it's. It's just a very loving environment.
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Last question going back to you actually as a kid I read that you attended summer camp at Stagedoor Manor and I'm curious what drew you to it and what influences, if any came out of it.
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My dad read about it, I believe somewhere and I had grown up, he took me to see theater a lot and I love so much. And so when he saw an advertisement for the camp I had, I was an only child and so my folks always tried to kind of put me in group situations and they are both very full time workers. So it's also part of it. So it was helpful to go for me to go away to sleep boy camp. And I have very mixed feelings about stage door in some ways because it was such a. What I encountered there was a level of privilege I'd not encountered before, but slash. And also I would not be in theater without it. And it was an extraordinary immersion into full time, you know, mania of the show must go on in a really classic sense. And I absolutely fed off of it. And I don't think I would have really thought about theater as a profession without having gone there. So I went there for six summers and developed. I was not necessarily because I didn't do musicals up until the last year where the camp didn't really have a rubric for popularity that didn't involve you not being in musicals. And so they put me in musicals my senior year even though I couldn't sing. But I had some very, very close friends, including the woman who became my college roommate for years and remains still a friend today. So.
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Oh lot. Lots there and I thank you.
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Yeah. Yeah. I wish. I wish well on the place. Obviously it's. I'm. I have a lot of debt and gratitude for it. It just was. It's not without its complications as they
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think almost every summer camp.
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Exactly.
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That any kids go to anywhere that are lucky enough to have those opportunities.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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Rachel, I thank you so much. I'm Lauren Claus Schneider with Rachel Chavkin, the director of My Joy is Heavy at the New York Theatre Workshop. Thank you, Sam.