Theatre review: Architecting

“How old are you, my dear?”…
“Twenty-eight,” she answered dully…
“That’s not a vast age. It’s a young age to have gained the whole world and lost your own soul, isn’t it?”
--Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, Gone With the Wind

As a transplanted Southerner, naturally I appreciate plays that feature both Gone With the Wind and post-Katrina New Orleans—this is the first play I’ve ever seen that examined Gone With the Wind, one of my favorite books but one that isn’t exactly politically correct. The TEAM has created several plays in one, all overlapping into a crazy quilt of ideas, fictional characters, actual people, and time periods. An architect comes to New Orleans to aid in the rebuilding; along the way, she encounters Margaret Mitchell (who died in 1949), Henry Adams (real-life nineteenth-century historian), Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler, Ashley Wilkes, beauty pageant contestants, an overbearing Hollywood producer who wants to remake Gone With the Wind, and an irate bartender who objects to having her flood-damaged business torn down. Architechting touches on a swirl of ideas, among them reconstruction, the Old South, Southernism in general, racism, historical fact vs. literary fiction, the movie business, New Orleans, war, romance, natural disasters, architecture, and sweet tea, set against video footage and clips from the movie.

Times and attitudes change, of course; despite the enduring popularity of the movie version of Gone With the Wind (1939), the story is now seen as condescending at best and flat-out bigoted at worst. Margaret Mitchell never meant for her only book to be considered racist or offensive; to her mind, she had written a eulogy for a civilization and a way of life now inexorably lost—a way of life still fetishized in that part of the world. Indeed, as she once remarked, she was ten before she realized the South lost. She wanted to examine those people that against all odds manage to survive when their worlds collapse, and those that seem no different—but don’t (a quality Mitchell deemed “gumption”). Famously, Scarlett O’Hara survived and prospered when so many of those around her succumbed to despair, wounded pride and spiritual starvation.

This part of the story suddenly seems eerily prescient, when dropped into post-Katrina New Orleans. While the spirit of New Orleans survived mostly intact, the city is still struggling, still full of crumbling houses, flood lines, empty lots, and literal and figurative ghosts. Architecting draws subtle connections between the Reconstruction after the Civil War, the rebuilding of post-Katrina New Orleans, and other attempted reconstructions—the one that leaps most notably to mind is the one going on now in Iraq. To paraphrase Rhett Butler, there is more money to be made in the breaking apart of a civilization than in the building of one.

This is an ambitious play, and its true genius lies in the characters created by the TEAM, a group of theatre artists that bonded as freshmen at NYU many years ago. Margaret Mitchell herself was my favorite—the stereotypical Atlantan with a sugar-sweet voice hiding a spine of steel. Scarlett O’Hara in the first act was mirrored by a 24-year-old Arkansan who is traveling to New Orleans to compete in the “Miss Scarlett O’Hara” pageant in the second (played by the same actress, of course). The historian’s appearances are too few and too brief, while the same actor makes a poetic turn as both Mammy and Ashley Wilkes.

For all the genius of the characters and their postmodern interactions, however, the story itself is one act too long; the first act is full of energy and surprises, while the second act falls flat. It fails to capitalize on the quiet poetry of the first, and the play’s momentum sputters to a halt long before the actual ending. But the story is a distinctly secondary attraction—the real reason to see this play is to see TEAM’s genius and ensemble in action. After all, where else can you see men in corsets dancing to “Dixie”?



Created by and starring the TEAM: Jessica Almasy, Frank Boyd, Heather Christian, Jill Frutkin, Libby King and Jake Margolin
Directed by Rachel Chavkin
Set and Costume Design: Nick Vaughan
Lighting Design: Jake Heinrichs
Sound Design: Matt Hubbs
Video Design: Brian Scott
Running Time: 150 minutes with one ten-minute intermission
PS 122, 150 1st Avenue at East 9th Street; 212-352-3101
Tickets $20
Tuesday through Saturday at 7:30 pm, Sunday at 5 pm
January 22—February 15, 2009