“We were in Vegas and we saw this impersonator named ‘Big Elvis’ who was extraordinary: a 500–600-pound guy with a beautiful voice, he just sat in a chair and sang Elvis songs,” says Rachel Chavkin, The TEAM’s artistic director, on the genesis of RoosevElvis. But the multilayered madcap “dramedy” transcends Elvis gags, as becomes clear through Walker Senior Curator of Performing Arts Philip Bither’s recent conversation with Chavkin. The piece, a retro roadtrip, features two modern-day women who sometimes inhabit the personae of the King and Teddy Roosevelt in a hallucinatory exploration of gender, masculinity, class, and hero worship.

Philip Bither

RoosevElvis draws some of its power from the process of performing masculinity. Could you talk about that–both your approach to investigating the masculine and the question of the impossible standards of masculinity that these two iconic figures represent?

Rachel Chavkin

“Impossible” is a good word, because we set ourselves up for abject failure right from the top. Libby King, well, she has short, dark, black hair–the color Elvis dyed his hair to. (Elvis, it turned out, was a natural blonde, but he felt that black would look better on camera.) But the space between Kristen Sieh, physically, and Theodore Roosevelt is profound. We were never going to get there, so it was always going to be about the space between the reality and the fiction of these two women channeling these two guys.

We started [developing the piece in rehearsal] with basically an hour and a half of silence. With the TEAM, there’s often as many as 14 different writers in a room, so with only four people we had this time to be slow. And it was so peaceful. It was just like rest. Kristen and Libby were barely doing anything at that point, acting-wise – or I should say, it was all really subtle. They were truly just focusing on putting on the drag. For Kristen it was putting on her chops, and for Libby it mostly centered on combing her hair repeatedly. And immediately Jake [Margolin, co-writer on RoosevElvis] and I were just mesmerized by it.

The TEAM has talked about character being the helmet that you fit inside your skull–and thus the eyes are sort of the goggles that you’re looking out at the world through. The TEAM is made up of extremely fine actors, in a very traditional Stanislavski sense of the word. And as Libby combed, it immediately got very blurry about whether it was Libby or some other person. She had, right from the get-go, expressed interest in impersonators, in Elvis impersonators as much as Elvis.

Bither

That was really the source of the show, right? Their two fascinations with these historical characters, or at least in Libby’s case the impersonators of these historical characters?

Chavkin

Exactly. Kristen became obsessed with Roosevelt when we were making Architecting (2009). She tried to get Teddy Roosevelt to be a character in Architecting, and I was just like, “Oh, my god, we have enough characters.”

Bither

And didn’t the Elvis impersonator obsession come out of the research around Mission Drift (2011), and spending time in Las Vegas?

Chavkin

Yeah. We were in Vegas, and we saw this impersonator named “Big Elvis” who was extraordinary: a 500–600-pound guy with a beautiful voice, he just sat in a chair and sang Elvis songs. It just got Libby spinning on people who live their lives through other people.

Bither

So when you started, did you already have in your heads the notion of investigating gender and identity? Or was it later when you started thinking about how complex this question of gender roles and identity might be in the piece?

Chavkin

A little bit of both, honestly. There was no way we could begin the show without thinking about gender in some basic way. But when we began we didn’t know if it was going to be two interlocking solo shows. We didn’t even know if they would be sharing any stage time. That’s how little we knew when we started. So the moment that the TEAM’s room feels best is when you’ve had this hunch, but something comes up in the research, or something comes up in the room, and you’re like, “Oh, that’s a good idea. Clearly, it was the idea, which is why we’re here, but we weren’t articulate about that at the time.”

I guess this moment came quite early on. We found out that Elvis had this Theodore Roosevelt quote on his wall in his office, “The Man in the Arena.” And the other moment that that really crystallized was when Margolin brought up Thelma & Louise (1991). We realized this is a touchstone, at least of our generation, culturally, that provokes a strong, either hugely loving or violent reaction, which is entirely about gender and about women striking back. But also women taking on this trope of the buddy road trip. So that was where we got to, “Okay, well this is going to be a road trip.”

Bither

Did you also quickly discover the much vaunted masculinity of those historic figures masked personalities of much greater complexity, a significant mix of what is typically thought of as feminine and masculine?

Chavkin

Definitely. It’s sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once you begin clarifying what you’re doing, everything begins to get clearer about what you’re researching, because there are so many different things you can say about these guys, right? They’re phenomenal figures and phenomenally complex in many ways. But the fact that Teddy’s wife and mother died on the same day. And Teddy was very, very Victorian. It’s not exactly fair to him, because he also supported women’s suffrage, so he was quite progressive in many ways. But he was known for dissecting animals from the time he was a kid, but he really liked putting things in boxes and organizing them. And part of his strength came from this unshakeable moral compass, which I think of as a distinctly patrician trait. Sort of like, “This is right and this is wrong, and I will not blink as I punch you in the face about what I think is right and wrong.” I happen to agree with a lot of Teddy’s values. Kristen and I joke about it a lot, because in my family, I am actually very similarly like, “Nope. There are good people and bad people and we can’t bother with the bad people.”

Bither

That’s so interesting because it speaks to your work with the TEAM and beyond. Even though you just ascribed to yourself a black-white kind of judgmentalism, you’re very empathetic in all your work, including this piece. It’s not only poking fun at the maleness–and fake maleness, at times–of these two characters, but it’s also quite an empathetic portrayal. It easily could have been a much more didactic track, a damnation of all things male. But you sort of brought a very different kind of humanistic take to it all.

Chavkin

Totally. I think that in the annals of good and bad, complexity is a good thing; didactic point of view is the bad thing.

Bither

It’s also interesting that you made this work at a moment in which gender and gender roles and the binaries themselves are being thrown into question. Did that lend some challenges or complexity around the meditation on maleness and femaleness and then the question of what do those binaries mean in today’s America?

Chavkin

I think so. Opposite of Teddy’s staunch organization of the world is Elvis’ blurriness of the world. When the TEAM’s approach to cooperative writing is going well each of us would likely identify a different central theme of the piece. But for me it was Elvis’ blurriness, and the fact that he freaked the shit out of mainstream America, not just because he was feminine in his masculinity, but because he was also black in his white.

Bither

Definitely. And Ed Sullivan made the cameras stay above waist when he first performed, so the hips couldn’t be seen.

Chavkin

Totally. And we set that sort of unbound sexuality against this much more Victorian loveliness that Teddy has.

Bither

The other thing that the TEAM has often looked at, and I presume it came from your family’s history of doing social change work is the investigation of class in America. And this clearly had a class investigation of these two very different figures.

Chavkin

Class is a huge element of this piece. As we worked on editing/trimming, we nearly cut a line we ultimately realized was quite vital, where [the factory worker character] Ann criticizes a choice not to fly to Graceland, and Elvis tenderly says, “You couldn’t afford to Annie.” To which Ann shamefully responds that the decision was actually about fear. But it’s ambiguous. Teddy is the definition of being born with a silver spoon in the mouth: he was from one of the wealthiest families in Manhattan. His father was involved in every board. It’s class in so much as you can claim a sense of ownership about who you want to be in the world. And, that has, I think, so much to do with class and born privilege.

As for my family, my grandfather did grow up doing plays in the amalgamated clothing workers union, but it was more community-based. He grew up in basically a communist cooperative in the Bronx. So art as an agent of social change is definitely a value that I got from my family, and my family are all the things that you said in terms of socialists–quite revolutionary in their thinking.

I grew up middle class, but my parents were so fucking astute and powerful in themselves, in part because of socialist or communist beliefs in the individual as citizen, and the power of solidarity, that I grew up with a distinct sense of privilege and entitlement. And as I’ve grown older I’ve become increasingly aware of how clear I am about my values when I walk into a room, and that not everyone has this privilege, and so I’ve got to be careful with how I exercise my opinions.

Bither

You mean that kind of confidence? The confidence to be able to hold your own in a room?

Chavkin

Exactly. And to be able to self-define.

Bither

That was so beautifully revealed in Libby’s and Kristen’s portrayal of the confidence of Roosevelt and the insecurity and almost depressive nature of the aching, lonesome Elvis.

Chavkin

Totally. So Elvis is the miracle, right? Because this kid grew up dirt poor in rural Tennessee. His family moved to Memphis when he was 13 or 14. But going into high school, according to Peter Guaralnick’s biography [the acclaimed two-part biography Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love), he saw this pink bolero jacket in a window and was like, “I’m going to wear that.” He did, and he was called “squirrel,” and I have no idea whether there was physical bullying as well as emotional bullying. So we’re interested in people who can see themselves and make themselves into who they want to be in the world both because of a privileged upbringing, and/or because they just have this innate vision of who the fuck they are, for whatever reason. And then on the flip side, there are the people who are basically subject to how the world labels them, and that’s Ann. So we have three very different echelons of power and self-empowerment on the stage. c

Bither

Let’s talk about hero worship. It seems to have potentially disastrous effects, but it also has the potential of transformative change.

Chavkin

Fundamentally it’s the question of: are you living your life through someone else? Because a hero can be a great model. It’s funny, these themes are the content for Primer for a Failed Superpower, one of the TEAM’s new works in development. For that show we’re forming this huge cover band, a multigenerational cover band with senior performers, the TEAM, and then teenagers covering protest songs from each of the three generations.

It’s non-narrative. It’s totally different from anything we’ve made before. And it took us a long time to really articulate, “Are we writing new protest songs? Is it all covers?” And then at a certain point, it was like, “No, it should be covers. Because that’s how you learn, first and foremost.” Like a baby covers their parents sticking their tongue out at them. And you learn your music by the older sibling whose music taste you steal and claim for your own. And then somewhere along the way, hopefully, you make the shift to internalizing that taste and it begins to get refined and personalized in a way that it becomes yours. And so to a certain extent, hero worship is a great tool because we have these idols through which we sort of are ciphering our own life. And then at the same time, if you live strictly in the shadow of this hero, which is what Ann has been doing with Elvis, really through the end of the play, it becomes suffocating.

Bither

I have to say when I first heard about the piece, I didn’t have the greatest expectations. I thought the Elvis character, and impersonators of Elvis, had been played out years ago in American culture. I was so pleasantly surprised when I went to see the finished work because it had so much more depth and complexity. Were you concerned about people just having had enough of the Elvis character, or other of those kinds of questions?

Chavkin

I do think the TEAM is always concerned with that. Like we don’t need to do something that we’ve seen already. But I don’t think it was a guiding fear of ours, because we knew we weren’t making a piece broadly about Elvis impersonators. It just took a while to get to what it was we were interested in. Which is that Ann’s preferred pronoun is Elvis, which is a very different thing.

Bither

RoosevElvis embodies such a mix of interesting styles and elements. I’ve been entertained reading a lot of the press to see people struggling to find the right words of what the style of the work is, because of its incorporation of slapstick and impersonation and a kind of zany absurdism, and then this quiet soulful quality of it all as well. Somebody referenced it as a “screwball dramedy.” Are you drawn to projects that don’t fall into a particular kind of easily described type of work?

Chavkin

Definitely. Kristen’s one of the greatest clowns I’ve ever known. And on the flip side, Libby just brings this innate sorrow to everything that she does. She’s such a beautiful soulful actress onstage. So we already have these two warring styles at home embodied in our two performers. And it goes back to not wanting to make something that people have seen before. So we’re deeply, deeply interested in tropes–invoking, very deliberately, the buddy comedy, the great American road trip story. And at the same time we’re always interested in bringing that into contact with new elements that people haven’t seen before.

Bither

Not to be too lofty about it all, but would you link the democratic, small-d process that a collaborative ensemble like the TEAM goes through in the making of work to this commitment to the large-D democratic system that is, in the best case, supposed to represent America?

Chavkin

Oh my god, yeah. Absolutely. I believe that everyone is an expert on something, and if you can craft the right question then you can receive the most profound responses. Whether that’s language-based, or the directive might be “Make a series of gestures, or stand in a certain way that somehow captures your life.” That’s one of my goals with Primer: to create a casing where everyone who participates—every senior, every teenager, and certainly any TEAM members or associates who are filling the middle generation—feel like they are taking ownership of something creative. And for me, personally, it’s totally lofty and I always at this point try to be very suspicious of my own pretentions, because I think I’ve had a lot of them. But it is very much linked to my politics. And I think it’s also that this room is proof of how fucking hard true democracy is, and how slow and awkward it is.

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