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TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 54, Number 4, Winter 2010 (T 208),pp. 118-135 (Article)

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118TDR: The Drama Review 54:4 (T208) Winter 2010. ©2010New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Labor of Architecting

Maurya Wickstrom

The TEAM’s play Architecting is about development. It is a relentless critique of capitalism’s ruthless tendency to create niches for its incursions and accumulations by, first, destroying, and then, developing. Three narratives structure the play, first presented by the New York ensemble in 2008. One is Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and the story of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler’s ascendancy as capitalist survivors on the wreckage of the Civil War. The second is a filming of a contemporary, politically correct, remake of the novel. The third is the build-ing of a “Traditional Neighborhood Development,” or TND, on the ruins of the post-Katrina

Figure 1. (above) Performer Libby King as a horse pulling the carriage of Gone With the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara (Kristen Claire Sieh) and Uncle Peter ( Jake Margolin). Architecting, 3LD Art & Technology Center, New York City, 2008. (Photo by Yi Zhao, courtesy of the TEAM)

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Ninth Ward. Cutting across these narratives is the figure of Henry Adams. Here he is a former professor of thermodynamics and history, obsessed by force, by a dynamic theory of history, and by Chartres Cathedral, by the fact that after it burned “the most perfect piece of architecture in the world” was rebuilt by an anonymous crowd of laborers “from everywhere.”1

The play, with its all-white cast, is situated within a racially explosive and contested set of points: slavery, Gone With the Wind, poisonous stereotypes, political correctness and the disguis-ing of racism, and the racial violence before, during, and in the wake of Katrina. But its found-ing innovation is that it eschews an often habitual “political” exploration of identity, in this case racial identity, as such. Identity in all its complications and promise, exclusions by iden-tity, affirmation of identity as empowerment, have for many years been a significant compo-nent of the issues central to a progressive politics and theory, and through which a progressive political theatre asserts itself, replicating the “value” of identity even as, as so many have pointed out, capitalism has thrived on identitarianism (see for example Brown 2006). Architecting sug-gests, instead, what the political might be, and what its relationship to theatre is, if it were renewed from this depleted terrain. I look to the play as an example of the call that Alan Read makes, in his book Theatre, Intimacy, and Engagement, for “reacquainting performance and pol-itics on renewed terms,” and to his definition of the singularity of theatre: “there needs to be an idea of the real (which performance always plays with), an account of the given (which theatre always exposes), the means to dissolve the given (the raison d’être of performance), and an affirma-tion of this dissolution as redemptive rather than destructive” (2008:36). The theme of demo-lition, destruction, burning, and building back up again is everywhere in the play. But the play shifts the ground from what Naomi Klein, in the text from which the TEAM worked, The Shock Doctrine, calls “disaster capitalism” to affirmation through the destruction of the given (2007:6).

What replaces identitarianism in this play is that which makes the political in this theatre anew: the affirmation of what the radical philosopher Alain Badiou calls an “Idea,” or eternal. In the play an Idea is resurrected through Henry’s cathedral. By the end of the play, in an emptied and new space, the cathedral appears as a space for all, as opposed to the boundless neoliberal2 and racial-ized privatization of space here exemplified in Phoenix Meadows, the Traditional Neighborhood Development. The Idea here is the affirmative declaration of a space for everyone, and to which all belong and may come, and as Carrie says, “in the building of which everyone will help who has lost his identity,” and in which everyone will be saying, “I’m sorry I’m sorry I forgive you.”

Maurya Wickstrom is Associate Professor of Theatre at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Performing Consumers: Global Capital and Its Theatrical Seductions (Routledge, 2006). Her articles have been published in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Annual, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Her essay, “Housed: The Irish State, Neoliberalism, and Irish Traveller Theatre” appears in Changing the Subject: Marvin Carlson and Theatre Studies, ed. Joseph Roach (University of Michigan Press, 2009). She is currently working on Performance, Human Rights, Traveling Bodies: Neoliberal Speculating, for the Studies in International Performance series, ed. Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton, at Palgrave Macmillan.

1. All quotes from the play are from the unpublished Architecting manuscript (TEAM 2009). [Ed. note: For more on the TEAM, see “What Did They Do to My Country!: An Interview with Rachel Chavkin” by Carol Martin, “Five Years and Change with the TEAM: Moving Fast Past the Apocalypse” by Rachel Chavkin, and “Art in the Age of Political Correctness: Race in the TEAM’s Architecting” by Rachel Jessica Daniel, all in this issue of TDR.]

2. I use “neoliberalism” here to indicate primarily one of its features: its tendency toward hyper-aggressive priva-tization. One of the foundations and symptoms of such privatization is the walling off of the entitled from everyone else.

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3. All quotations from Chavkin are from my interviews with her in New York City on 12 and 19 May 2009.

For Badiou, to live according to an Idea or an eternal or a truth is the only way to be fully alive, or political, in what he calls the “lusterless form of the present” of democratic material-ism (2009:56). By democratic materialism he means an endless diversity, pluralism, and con-sensus making that surrenders any conviction to a play of opinion, to the practice of tolerances that disguise divisive, ongoing, and cruel identitarianisms — all of which are the mechanisms by which capitalism does its enervating work on the human.

We can think of architecture as the human occupation that organizes and manages and designs spaces for known uses, or that innovates upon what is known, or suggests utopian vari-ations on the known, or supports the development of capitalist projects and spaces across the world. Architecting, as a practice inaugurated in this production, is something else. It’s the labor that makes a new space appear. Rachel Chavkin, artistic director for the TEAM, says that as they worked on the play they were asking, “How would you build a space that encourages jus-tice?”3 Justice is an Idea too, one that is continually obscured and resurrected in a new present. In Badiou’s conception, Ideas are resurrected from a historical moment following which they may have disappeared. When they are resurrected they create what Badiou calls a “new pres-ent” (2009:52) — the present in which the resurrected Idea can organize a defiant “body” (67). They are resurrected through what he calls a “site” (361–72). A site is a kind of situation that appears in a given world — say, for example, post-Katrina New Orleans. The site makes possi-ble the appearance of what has not been allowed to appear, what has been suppressed, in a given world — for instance, an egalitarian space for everyone. In the play, in the mix of that post-Katrina world, Carrie, the architect of the gated community development, finds herself unable to proceed smoothly. She is waylaid; she finds herself in a site: a strange neighborhood bar, a strange history. Through this site (which eventually disappears) she discovers her capacity by the end of the play to live with the Idea, to join a body (all the people who will come to the Cathedral). The Idea of Chartres, built on demolished grounds, by everyone and for all, is res-urrected. As Chavkin says, she “profoundly believes in optimistic ends.”

The relationship between theatre and politics in Architecting concerns a new kind of theat-rical labor that makes politics a matter of affirming the resurrection of an Idea, which must by definition be a for all, nonidentitarian. The final phrase from Badiou’s Logics of Worlds might as well describe the theatrical labor of this play: “We will only be consigned to the form of the dis-enchanted animal for whom the commodity is the only reference-point if we consent to it. But we are shielded from this consent by the Idea, the secret of the pure present” (2009:514).

The original space of the play is Melly’s, a Ninth Ward neighborhood bar slated for demo-lition. The notice is already nailed to the door. At the opening of the play this bar space con-sists of a simple flat (fronting a square metal structure), which comprises a wall of the bar, with a door to the bar embedded in it, stage right. In the wall stage left, there is a large open-ing, a service window/counter through which Melly serves drinks. There is a little metal table, with typewriter. There is also an old fan, along with an antique microphone, which charac-ters use often. The bar is surrounded in the much larger playing area of P.S. 122 by construc-tion materials, presumably walls, in their white plastic Tyvek wrapping. The encroachment of Phoenix Meadows looms. Up against these walls lean a great many brown letter-size envelopes: Margaret Mitchell’s manuscript, as she herself, historically, stowed the manuscript all through her house in these envelopes during the eight years it took her to write Gone With the Wind. There are video monitors mounted on the bar structure, and the Tyvek surround serves as a screen for very large projections.

At first, the bar looks like a typical low-budget realist set. But it becomes almost imme-diately a site, unnameable and unknown to the TND, but nevertheless its strange interior. It becomes a site through a process perhaps unleashed by the dynamo, by force, by a dynamic

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theory of history, a history of resurrection. In it all, temporalities and spatialities are simultane-ously brought into collision, inexplicable interweavings. In the play, the bar is demolished for the TND as per the demolition notice on the door, and it demolishes itself, the site disappear-ing as the Cathedral appears. On the surface of it, the bar serves as multiple locations, just like any unit set: a convenience store, Atlanta, a car, the producer’s office, and so forth. But it is a dynamo, putting all locations into dynamic and cataclysmic relations, all elements of a site. Part of the theatrical labor of architecting is to make what is physically present onstage into, not a set, but a site.

As the audience enters, Melly, the bar owner, a handyman named Josh, and Henry Adams are in the bar. Melly says, “I’m going to tell you just a little more about me with my favorite medi-ums of song and beverage.” She sings, in a mix of folk, country and western, and winsome rock, to the incoming and then settled audience for almost 30 minutes, crooning us into comfort, into the mood of New Orleans, into the mood of the south. She is as local, original- neighborhood, and Confederate-patriotic as it gets. She takes swigs from a bottle, her pronounced drawl as syrupy and languorous as her body. Josh accompanies her diligently on the guitar. Henry is working fastidiously on his model of the Cathedral.

The 27-year-old Henry has taken refuge in Melly’s bar. He’s a regular, though dead long before Katrina. Chavkin says that the TEAM spent five years unpacking Adams’s 1900 essay in The Education of Henry Adams, “The Dynamo and the Virgin.” It is an essay on thermo dynamics, the dynamo and force, especially as for Adams these are connected to Chartres. In the essay, Adams describes what was for him the catastrophic and liberatory collapse of the platitudi-nous certainties of the historians, with their love for defining logical sequences in the unfolding

Figure 2. Margaret Mitchell ( Jessica Almasy, far right) presents the characters Ashley and Melanie Wilkes ( Jake Margolin and Jill Frutkin), Rhett Butler (Frank Boyd), and Scarlett O’Hara (Kristen Claire Sieh), through the window to young architect Carrie Campbell (Libby King, far left), a northerner voyaging to the south for the first time. Architecting, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 2008. (Photo by Eamonn McGoldrick, courtesy of the TEAM)

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of history. This happened to him when he saw the dynamo for the first time. For Chavkin and the TEAM, Adams’s stunning line in the essay became foundational and gestational for the piece. He says, describing himself, “he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new” (Adams [1918] 1999:382; emphasis added). Henry Adams, and his Cathedral, function in the play as the motor, or the dynamo, for the conviction that there is force that erupts in things as they are, in worlds, that can clear space and time, leave space for “the new,” or what I call here the new present. His model circulates onstage throughout the play. It is he who is guiding Carrie.

The play proper starts when Henry moves to the microphone to introduce us to the basics of thermodyamics, force, energy, and the dynamo. This scene is very soon irrupted in what the stage directions call “a big beautiful cue. The dynamo. Which is an engine,” during which the space/time of the bar is transfigured in collisions of strange and unidentifiable forces that undo the specific nature of the space of the bar. A huge projection of what I take to be a dynamo, moving, whirling, a spinning thing with blades, fills the space. During this irruption, a projec-tion of Carrie appears on the surround screen created by the Tyvek covered walls. She is driv-ing, as Henry tells her later to imagine it, “your rental car at some terrific speed toward a 12th-century cathedral.” He is already imagining the collision, the “broken neck” that will inau-gurate Carrie into something new. She’s on her cell phone, in a manic conversation with an unseen Lucy, some kind of partner in the TND work. They’re working on damage control with the investors, who have learned that her famous father, the original architect of the TND, has died. Weaving through this strange and disorienting and beautiful cue, Margaret Mitchell is singing...“admirable things...” Moving between projection and stage, Carrie practices the speech with which she will need to convince the investors that everything is full steam ahead with the TND. She makes false starts, unable to proceed. She is enduring the loss of her father, in whose business and artistic model she is made. Franklin Delmore McKinley, who will be the hero of the sequel to Gone With the Wind that Mitchell begins to write, sings from off stage, “build your house on a rock, boy, build your house on a stone.” There is a horrendous crack of thunder. Another hurricane is brewing, preceded by more cracks of thunder. As the cue ends, the stage directions read, “The rest of the world swings into place. The sound of stapling.”

Carrie, in her professional’s trench coat, enters the bar. She’s a bundle of northern ner-vous energy and clipped speech. She’s just attached another demolition notice. The first thing she notices is the model of Chartres, and points out to Henry that he glued his clocher vieux on wrong. This begins a wary circling between architect and historian. Henry and Melly treat Carrie with skepticism and subtle derision, their cynicism regarding post-Katrina northern developers coming south with their housing redevelopment projects dripping off them. They’ve seen them before. Brad Pitt’s been here for a while.

Into this place in which it doesn’t seem to matter when characters actually lived, Margaret Mitchell enters, carrying provisions for the hurricane. Henry introduces them. Carrie’s breath is taken away by meeting Margaret Mitchell, who treats her with a cutting ironic edge as Carrie tries to describe what a TND is, full of enthusiasm:

CARRIE: Anyway, a Traditional Neighborhood Development will foster an old sense of real American community. It’s something my father came up with.4

MARGARET: Well, I do like an old sense.

4. The TEAM is basing the TND idea on the architectural movement New Urbanism, and Carrie’s father is almost certainly modeled on its cofounder, Andres Dumas. The first example of this kind of town planning is Seaside, Florida, founded in 1979, where parts of The Truman Show (1998) were filmed. Dumas’s New Urbanist firm built the Disney town, Celebration, founded in 1994.

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5. The irony in this commandeering of the “view” of the wetlands is that it was in part due to the denigration of the wetlands that Katrina did the damage it did.

CARRIE: Awesome. That is a really remarkable coincidence. In fact one of the home styles we’ll be offering is a mansionplex which is modeled after the original Tara from the 1939 film. There will be a total of three of these available for purchase, each commanding a picturesque view of the Phoenix Meadow wetlands.5

MARGARET: (Beat) Uh-huh.

Outside, the storm mounts. Josh comes through the room carrying a large piece of plywood to nail over the door. He leaves through the door. There is hammering. Carrie opens the door and sees that the opening is boarded up against the hurricane. She wants to leave. When some-one else leaves through the door, it’s suddenly no longer boarded up. Soon after, Carrie makes a run for it, thinking she can get out. When she opens the door, the plywood is again nailed over the opening and blocking her exit. This begins her surreal confinement in the bar/site, even as throughout the play she simultaneously exists and works in a real world outside the bar.

Margaret throws her a copy of Gone With the Wind and Carrie reads from it, “it was a sav-agely red land.” Costumed characters drift onstage. Scarlett O’Hara appears. Melly appears now as Melanie Wilkes, from the novel. On the projection screen: huge circling blades, the dynamo. Onstage, down center, a fan continuously blows air upstage. Sometimes characters stand directly in front of it, their hair streaming backwards. Gone with the wind...what is gone, what is going, what is devastated. Margaret and Scarlett, Melanie and Henry sing, “Oh, I wish I was in Dixie, look away, look away Dixie land.” They are absorbing Carrie into a different continuum. She will be absorbed into multiple historical and contemporary imbrications of devastation and the enrichment of capitalists, the cycle that she herself is now repeating in New Orleans. As Chav-kin told me, in meeting Margaret and the others, Carrie is altered in her tracks: “their complex sense of history causes her to question her idea of progress. She’s stepped into a festering wound and doesn’t know how to proceed.”

With the exception of the actor playing Mitchell, who plays only one other character, each actor plays multiple roles. The actor who plays Henry now enters as Mammy. Margaret makes Carrie, as Scarlett, call for Mammy. At the same time, as the stage directions indicate, “the space devolves into chaos/Hollywood rhythm.” Scott Staphf (played by the actor who plays Josh), the producer of the Gone With the Wind remake, makes his splashy entrance. He’s doing five things at once but he’s making an urgent call to John (played by the Henry/Mammy actor). John is a successful black director who Scott is wooing as a director for the project in the interests of political correctness. Margaret scurries around with her typewriter as if trying to escape what’s coming. From here on in, the barbarity of this new capitalist approach to her work alienates and enrages Margaret, for whom it is the same encroachment by brutal and specifically capitalist northerners that her book describes. Carrie keeps reading from the novel. There is tension dur-ing the filming because John signs on to direct, but refuses to go along with cleaning it up. He wants to do the thing as is. He, whose parents did not allow the book in the house, has read it, is reading it. He is “revolted.” He is “enchanted.”

The TEAM members too read and re-read the book in its entirety. Chavkin says that the book is much more “contradictory and dangerous” and “poisonous and incredible” than the cleaned up 1939 movie by which most of us know it. She says that the TEAM thought of John’s insistence on doing the book verbatim as an impulse to destroy it, rather than to have it recur in ever more cleaned up versions as a substantial part of American mythology. And the TEAM’s version of Gone With the Wind, in one sense, is also designed to destroy it. It is part of the labor of architecting. In the place of the destruction of Gone With the Wind, in the site that is created onstage, Mitchell’s affirmative sequel is able to appear. That which previously had been sup-pressed, unallowable, appears.

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If John insists on filming at least some scenes that are “true” to the original, he’s doing it as part of a rampantly profit-driven project. It’s a project that can only rake in the amounts Scott expects if it is politically correct, if its identity politics are in order, if it has a black director. Meeting with Mitchell in Atlanta, Scott browbeats the resistant, cutting, and angry Margaret into signing a contract saying that she did the rewrites. They need her name on it.

SCOTT: Okay Peggy, here you go. Take a load off. (Gets her a chair) Okay. You don’t need to get all defensive. This isn’t personal. Really, I don’t care what you wrote. I believe all that stuff that’s put out about research you did on slave dialects. I really don’t care, but the studio —

MARGARET: If you don’t care why did you bother writing entirely new characters for the film? For example, a one “James King, born in 1864, great grandfather to civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.” Mr. James King works as a gardener for Rhett and Scarlett and moonlights as a local civil rights figure, who is successful in convincing his employers and their high-society counterparts to pay their black employees better wages?

SCOTT: Yeah.

[...]

SCOTT: Now that we have MLK’s great-grandfather in here freedom fighting, it’s safer for us to resurrect Gone With the Wind as a brand name. And we’ll keep some of those happy slave types that you wrote so wonderfully. We just needed a disclaimer.

MARGARET: I’m not afraid of people seeing my book exactly the way it was written.

SCOTT: Yeah, but it’s not going to make any money.

MARGARET: I don’t care about money. I have money.

SCOTT: I care Peggy. We are gonna make so much fucking money. It’s totally unprecedented Peggy.

MARGARET: I don’t understand why you don’t just get some other writer, who doesn’t write the kind of characters that I write and make your own little money making a movie about your civil war or some car that talks.

SCOTT: We’ve done that. I’ve done that. This is Gone With the Wind. It’s Coca-Cola. It’s Nike. It’s McDonalds, it’s fucking Gone With the fucking Wind. We need your name on this.

It is unclear if she ever does sign, but Margaret seems to be at the center of the film’s pro-duction. She seems through it all to be in between seeing the characters as they are in her novel, and negotiating with the actors playing the same characters in the film. It is almost as if she enjoys being reacquainted with her novel and the characters, hearing it again. But she is also incorporated into the film, seemingly, as a character. The actor playing Mammy for the film (again played by Henry/John/Mammy-from-the-novel) puts a hoop skirt on Mitchell. She asks him his name.

In the sequence below, it’s as if she wants to and must dig through the layers of Gone With the Wind to encounter the reality of this contemporary black actor. As he speaks, she begins to type what he is saying. She is beginning something else. And something is coming apart, some-thing is being demolished. Throughout the conversation, Mammy is taking apart some of the structure of the bar. He takes a section off of it, and puts it through the window of the bar. He puts it in an arbitary position, sideways, with a portion of it jutting out into the space that was opened by its removal. He climbs through the window; he climbs onto the roof. With this disas-sembly, characters routinely climb onto the roof, into the window, as if the structure has no real materially prescribed configuration. What happens in the exchange is an addition into the site

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of the archangel Michael, who will later be woven into Carrie and Henry’s vision. The dialogue suggests that there are succeeding generations of archangel Michaels — as of a resurrection.

MARGARET: What’s your real name, anyway?

MAMMY: Precious, Precious Robillard.

MARGARET: Not your slave name. Your given name.

MAMMY: Harriet Tubman.

MARGARET: Oh, go to hell.

MAMMY: Terror.

MARGARET: Excuse me?

MAMMY: Terror. My father named me Terror.

MARGARET: Tara?

MAMMY: Terror. Like the emotion. Like what you feel when things break down.

MARGARET: Nice name.

MAMMY: Daddy used to ride with the Angels. Promised a buddy that he’d name his first-born Terror. Daddy went by Michael. Handsomest man you ever saw. With a pair of angel’s wings tattoed across his back.

Daddy and his friends used to call each other by their father’s names. It’s an affectionate thing, a way to keep their memories alive. You can call me Michael if you want.

MARGARET: Wait, where’re you going?

MAMMY: I’m going away now.

MARGARET: Won’t you stay? I so like having you right there. I said stay.

MAMMY: The thing is Ms. Mitchell, that in addition to our many disagreements, I don’t like you very much. (MAMMY hammers the flat into place, then throws a copy of GWTW out to MARGARET.)

With this there is another kind of seismic shift, with striking music described in the stage directions as “eerie.” There is another change in the projections, which are almost continually playing, either live-feed images of the actors, or the Selznick movie, or of driving, highways, refugeeing from the destruction, or driving fast toward a collision with the 12th-century cathe-dral. There is a constant sense of movement and wind. Gathering onstage are characters from the novel/film and Carrie, who is now Scarlett’s horse, reined by the strings of her corset to Scarlett’s manipulations. Scarlett, like Mammy, like Melanie, wears a corset and a hoop frame. Mammy also wears a big black hugely stuffed bra over her clothes. Melanie is reading from the novel — again the description of the red earth. At the same time that Carrie is made to prance as the horse, she continues to practice her marketing speech. It continues to elude her. Something is happening to her. She is increasingly haunted by a sense that something has been lost, that she can’t move forward, can’t proceed with the TND, can’t get over the loss. She is face to face with her own profiteering through destruction and loss.

CARRIE: This is the first take. Phoenix Meadows. First. Fuck. Second take. My name is Caroline Campbell ladies and gentlemen [...] This is a new vision of the American com-munity. But a return to something lost. Ladies and Gentlemen, something has been lost.

[...]

There has BEEN A F**KING LOSS HERE people!!!... How to sell loss.

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Almost simultaneously, Scott is crowing about his marketing strategies for the movie.

SCOTT: [...] And this poster is for our most important target, 15-year-old girls everywhere, notice the horses, dancing, lots of sex. It’s Titanic meets 8 Mile.

If Margaret Mitchell’s intention in writing Gone With the Wind was, as she says throughout the play, to find out why some survive loss and others don’t, the film in progress proves to the nth degree that those who survive are the capitalists. If Scarlett O’Hara in the novel survived by becoming the capitalist that her “genteel” forbearers loathed, the Scarlett actress in the film is an evolved and even more vicious version. She is chosen for this quality, in an audition dur-ing which she delivers her monologue while Scott, the hyper-capitalist, in no real space or time, is virtually molesting Carrie, still trussed up as the horse. As he does so, he calls out the bodily specifications for the actress who will get the role; “Nice tits. Not too big, but tits, you know?” There is another huge disorienting moment, a mysterious droning tone under everything, movement in the projections, dramatic light change. Scarlett’s monologue:

SCARLETT: She started it, but I get to finish. I’m a symbol, you see, with a voice like a mission bell. Charisma beats the shit out of morality, any day of the week, don’t you think? [...] Isn’t it delicious! Her reputation suffers, hell, her house has been burned down a half-dozen times hasn’t it? But I’m still America’s sweetheart. So from here on out you just come to me if Peggy poses a problem. Bring all your ideas to me, and we will make sure that everybody’s piggy bank gets pudgy. I’ll deal with Peggy. You wanna know how? I’m a survivor, Mr. Staphf. I will be here tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow. Peggy knows better than anyone that you have to get out of the road if you can’t lend a hand. You’re standing right in the middle of this gentleman’s new road, honey.

There is another big cue here. Scott is now Rhett, in the movie. He and Scarlett have a big movie kiss. There is chaos, dancing. Carrie is again made to say Scarlett’s lines. A test; is she, does she want to be, how does it feel to be, the contemporary parallel to Scarlett. Margaret is narrating from the novel. It is the moment of war. Scarlett and Rhett meet. Carrie now stands watching it all. The sequence is intense, a heartbeat rhythm, footlights. Rhett says to Scarlett:

RHETT: What most people don’t seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the up-building of one.

CARRIE: And what does all that mean?

RHETT: Your family and my family and everyone here tonight made their money out of changing a wilderness into a civilization. That’s empire building. But there’s more in empire wrecking.

CARRIE: What empire are we talking about?

RHETT: The empire we are living in —

MARGARET: The South.

RHETT: The Confederacy —

RHETT and MARGARET: The Cotton Kingdom.

RHETT: It’s breaking up right under our feet. Only most fools won’t see it and take advantage of the situation caused by the collapse.

RHETT, SCARLETT, MARGARET: I’m making my fortune out of the wreckage.

Rhett becomes Scott again. Driving with John in Atlanta, he announces that he is going to move the filming to New Orleans because, “They’ve already got the rubble.”

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The bar has changed again. The window is boarded up, a whole section of the flat is gone and the Tyvek background is visible. Scarlett appears as a tour guide to Atlanta, the city that was burned down three times. The symbol of Atlanta is the phoenix, as Melanie says. Capitalist rebirth. Scarlett enthuses:

SCARLETT: Welcome to a commercial city! Today’s Atlanta is home to national and regional corporate headquarters. You can start your visit in the era of your choice. Let’s visit Margaret Mitchell’s Atlanta.

Interjected into Scarlett’s sales pitch, Carrie tries her own again. But here, suddenly, the cathedral reappears. The model is on the roof, as is, suddenly, Scarlett. As once again Carrie’s certainty in her speech fails: “It’s not like I’m gonna build uh...cathedral instead of...you know? It’s just we need to — I think these people need us to — to save something.” Carrie continues to falter, crack. She has a phone conversation with her dead father, lovely elegiac music playing softly underneath:

CARRIE: There is a question of blame. And I don’t know what to save. And I am feeling very lost [...] But there is some sort of shifting. And waiting... I don’t know Dad. I don’t know what’s happened here. It’s like something just opened up.

She tries to attach to Phoenix Meadows some of what Chartres, on her mind more and more, may signify. She tells Melly,

CARRIE: The story goes it was struck by lightening and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on the old site, everybody from the poverty stricken to the nobles, everyone. And they worked until the building was completed. But they all remained anonymous. The most perfect piece of architecture in the world and no one knows to this day who built it. And this can happen here.

Despite the lure of the cathedral, Carrie is still building the by now nearly finished TND, still trying to find a solution to her increasingly excruciating awareness of the loss that has made it possible. But she is trying to find a solution among the prescribed givens of an artificially developed, gated, private, “traditional” community. At the end of this act, she’s solved the prob-lem of what to save, but is only confronted with the limits of her understanding, yet again.

CARRIE: Okay. I’m saving a house. We’re keeping a house. There’s one house on this block it’s a blue house it had very little damage well it had a lot but. It will be the memorial. It will be the reminder. It will be the fixed point and Phoenix Meadows will radiate outwards around it.

Melanie and Margaret are unmoved.

Figure 3. Survivors Rhett Butler (Frank Boyd) and Scarlett O’Hara (Kristen Claire Sieh) stand with their creator Margaret Mitchell ( Jessica Almasy) and proclaim the fortune they will grow “out of the wreckage.” Architecting, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 2008. (Photo by Eamonn McGoldrick, courtesy of the TEAM)

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MARGARET: So this will be, like, a reminder?

CARRIE: YEAH.

MARGARET: Where’s the family that used to live in that house?

CARRIE: We’re, uh, we’re not sure. The records were so damaged, and probably they were renting.

MELLY: St. Louis. They’re in St. Louis. (CARRIE is taken aback) The father went missing. Whole family gone. And they owned their home (exiting).

MARGARET: Do you know the family name?

CARRIE: Uh, McKinley.

The boundaries of the site are permeable. Mitchell reaches through and seizes the McKinley story from its Ninth Ward reality, and conscripts Franklin Delmore into the new fiction that she has perhaps already begun to write, as her book, along with the bar, are disappearing. He will be the fiction and the affirmative force through which the final devastation that clears space for the cathedral will come.

Architecture begins to turn definitively to architecting at the beginning of Act II. Carrie has been working feverishly throughout intermission. The space has changed. The door section of the original bar is now little more than a doorframe pulled stage right. A lot of the Tyvek is vis-ible in back now, as are two of the theatre’s pillars. The window is unboarded again. Carrie is obsessed with the cathedral. She tells a joke.

CARRIE: An architect and a money man are in a coffee shop. The architect says to the money man, “I want to build a cathedral,” and the money man says, “Sure, but I need you to build a bank first.”

Four months later. The bank is built. Same architect, same money man. Over coffee.

Architect says to the money man, “I want to build a New American Cathedral,” and the money man says, “Sure, but I need you to build another bank first.”

Four months later. Another bank is built. Same architect, same money man. Over coffee.

Architect says, “I want to build — you know — something that you know people want to BE inside and that IS beautiful — something that WE have never seen before...,” and the money man says, “Okay. Sounds like we’re on the same page. So a bank just like the last one but room for a parking lot.”

She is sweating, breathless, hyper-animated. The cathedral is back on the roof. She has a new plan, a plan for destruction. She makes the speech she has being trying to prepare, take after take, for the buyers, backers, investors, in an entirely different register. As she speaks, Henry is stretching string in a triangular shape around her. The two bottom points are affixed to the outer corners of the table at which she’s been drawing and from which she speaks. The top point is attached at the roof right at the cathedral, as if pointing to it. As she speaks, she is framed by the triangle, guided to the cathedral. The beautiful recurring drone moves under-neath her, the sound of force, the bar as a site becoming more and more tangible.

CARRIE: This is the first take. What I propose to MWH global contractors and their... Take 2. What I propose to MH global ENGINEERING and their superiors at... This is the 3rd take, this is the final take: What I propose to MWH global engineering and their esteemed colleagues, the directors of the New Orleans Strategic Recovery and Rebuilding Plan is an...is an act of architectural...is an act of architectural destruction [...] I want to get the world’s best engineers and designers to construct an entirely realistic

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plan of various available explosives to systematically destroy various part of the nation’s infrastructure...

Wild, elated, she goes on naming all that she would destroy and the things she would keep that she likes. All the McDonalds, for instance, would be blown up, but not the arches. The land-scape would be dotted with Golden Arches. It’s a vision in which all possible ordering, all pos-sible localizations of hierarchies of money and power are gone, nothing given. When she is finished, she takes down yet another part of the structure. It is part of the (real) demolition of the bar for the TND, but also architecting’s demolition. The idea of seeing new space, or clear-ing space for the new, is catalyzed by Henry, now on the roof with Margaret. The door has been wrenched from its frame and lies on the ground. We are returned to the archangel Michael at the top of the church at Mont St. Michel, an island left standing perilously by the waters around it, subject to unpredictable and dangerous tides, subject to floods, and Michael, the commander of the army of God, the angel of forbearance and mercy, the angel of healing, and the patron of mariners, of the waters. Henry might as well be urging upon Carrie the necessity to live with the Idea.

HENRY: You know...I don’t know when it started, but now, all I think about is cathedrals. I can’t remember why I ever used to think about anything less magnificent. There are things in the world, Carrie Campbell, and then there are magnificent things in the world. Don’t waste your time, y’know? Chartres.

HENRY and CARRIE: The most perfect piece of architecture in the world.

HENRY: Mont Saint Michel.

CARRIE: Mount Saint Michael in peril of the seas. The archangel loved heights. Why did he love heights?

HENRY: Options: from a theological perspective: closer to God. From a military perspective, he could see across the water for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles. From a revisionist historian’s perspective, maybe he was calling for help from higher ground.

CARRIE: What are you seeing up there? Is anything different?

HENRY: Space

CARRIE: Yeah.

HENRY: Space filled with an unbelievable amount of shit.

CARRIE: I think I’m waiting for something.

HENRY: (Staring off for a while. Perhaps slow motion clearing) I think it’s time. I think it’s time to clear the slate Carrie Campbell.

What...what will be the first to go?

The play crashes back into the Josh and Caroline story, begun earlier in the play. There is beautiful vast music built into the drone, Caroline is a young working-class girl, also surviving loss, the loss of her father, who is going to New Orleans to compete in a Miss Scarlett O’Hara pageant. She is going to win, and thereby recoup her life. She wrecks her car and finds Josh at his gas station, outfitted with a wall of snacks and CCTVs (closed circuit TVs), in Arkansas, another of the locations moved into the mix of the site that the play makes. She finds him read-ing Gone With the Wind, as in love with the book as she, and the two drive toward New Orleans, first while sitting on two chairs, and then in a projection. They sing to one another in a ten-der and poignant sequence. Mitchell collides into them through the sleeping Caroline’s dream,

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while the actor who plays Henry/John/Mammy, briefly here as Scarlett, glides through the darkness. Caroline dreams of the moment when she accepts her prize for winning the pag-eant, but also of Mitchell telling her she’s not the real thing. Mitchell’s interest is in Josh, who is genuinely and naively and newly taken with Gone With the Wind. He has no acquisitive goals. She talks to him from the roof as he drives. Abruptly there is a collision into blinding light as Margaret is being interviewed by a TV station where she flares up at the interviewer, with Scott officiating, “What was that question again? Something ludicrous about my feelings on race?” and announces her sequel, The Ballad of Franklin Delmore McKinley. She says, “I only know that we must answer for our actions sooner or later. And this sequel, this sequel is my answer.”

The story she tells is about how Franklin’s family went to St. Louis after Katrina and Franklin stayed and fought to keep his house from being destroyed. But when no one he knew returned, he left New Orleans “with no other plan than to somehow single handedly remind his nation that an entire city had been left to rot.” Underneath the words, very softly, the song... “Were you there, when they crucified my Lord...” Franklin, played by Henry/John/Mammy/Terror appears onstage, crouched, tired, thumb out by the side of the road. He’s hitchhik-ing across “a country that he sees as scarred at every turn by injustices to black people, locales of travesties to humanity small and large,” until he gets to Arkansas and Josh’s gas station store. When Josh leaves with Caroline, he stays there, with a wall of broken CCTV monitors he assembles for the company of their flickering images, images distorted in color. They are “inhabited by clips and amalgamations of people who passed through. Fabricated friends and disciples.” He sees “the ghosts of his city rising in the Arkansas mists. The ghosts of his ances-try sitting in the thick trees surrounding the station.” He doesn’t sleep. There are no more customers and:

MITCHELL: We see Franklin returning from various excursions outside of the station. He has met the people who live in the night woods.

Here Mitchell joins Franklin in pounding steps forward followed by somersaults backwards. The sequence, the volume, build force, utterly compelling.

MITCHELL: He has learned the old negro spirituals. He has learned the old names of places. He learns the Voodoo magics. Franklin returns to the station. He rallies his many CCTV friends, tinted varying degrees of dark, into an army and he leads a forced march back to New Orleans.

McKinley will march with these friends. There are traces of St. Michael leading God’s army in McKinley’s march. But the army here is not the Union, or the Confederacy, as in Gone With the Wind, but an army of people, who, whatever color they are, have been tinted “varying degrees of dark,” an army of black people, marching back to New Orleans. Mitchell’s speech is a chant, hurled into the microphone, loud, kinetically captivating, surging. With the full-throttle words “New Orleans” that end the sequence just quoted, we are hit full volume with punctured, stac-cato, dissonant organ music, a disciplined chaos of notes, irresistibly dynamic. Franklin moves upstage right, and runs downstage left to a full force in-the-air kick, followed by jerks of full body movement, alive with force. He is joined, one by one, by the full cast and the diagonal downstage run with kick is repeated as each joins, and as a group they are pulled back from the kick into somersaults, punctuated, staccato movements, rolls, falls, leaps, as the music goes on, and Mitchell chants over it, moving forward with the sequel. This is a full eruption of theatrical labor...bringing into being the potentials of the site, of architecting.

MITCHELL: (Still during the dancing) He is the Major General, and is leading a forced march back to New Orleans. A march that gets confused about what year it is. It is at times a Civil War march, burning everything in its wake; at times a Mardi Gras march sweeping everything it passes into its bellowing furnaces; at times a Civil Rights march arm in arm, impervious to the world.

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Suddenly, it all stops. There is quiet, and then the renewal of the chant/song, “build your house on a rock, boy,” as the actors take big steps and slam their feet down to the beat. This then builds to a charged, fragmented choreography of the desperation of New Orleans resi-dents, unable to make it to higher ground, living through Katrina, signaling ineffectively for help to helicopters overhead, waving, the stage directions say, to Bush’s helicopter, shoving their bodies through flooded streets. With surreal and chaotic precision, the scene merges into the party following the film’s winning, presumably, the Oscar. There is a mix of actors replaying scenes from the movie, Scarlett advertising spin-off products, and submerged Katrina victims calling for help. Scarlett does her acceptance speech in character, “Money is the most important thing in the world and I don’t ever intend to be without it again.” Scarlett shakes Carrie’s hand: “My name is Katie Scarlett O’Hara Staphf” (the Scarlett actress has snagged Scott), “I hear there’s so much money in real estate.”

Margaret is still telling her sequel:

MARGARET: Franklin Delmore McKinley arrives in New Orleans as the sun rises for the first time in months and finds that it has been turned into a walled suburban community. Artificially raised above the flood lines. (Singing) Little boxes on the hillside. The pattern of the streets is overlaid with a sprawling maze of cul-de-sacs. The houses are already purchased. Franklin Delmore McKinley’s house is still standing as a cultural curio. There is a spiffily dressed band that plays New Orleans Jazz in his living room, and a wet bar serving Hurricanes on weekends. Franklin walks in and addresses the tourists.

FRANKLIN: Thank you for coming. My father would have been so proud.

MARGARET: Franklin Delmore McKinley burns his house to the ground. Franklin Delmore McKinley burns his house to the ground. And walks West. Heading to Mexico.

(The fire burns. It is the centerpiece of Phoenix Meadows burning to the ground.)

Images of fire are projected on what is left of the bar structure and on the surround screen. Carrie runs on, hysterical at the destruction of her “memorial,” vascillating between what she is becoming and what she has been. Henry is elated, as if Carrie herself had set the fire, cleared the space, cleared the “unbelievable amount of shit.” And perhaps she did.

HENRY: This is magnificent! Well done Carrie!

This fire, and the emptiness in its wake is now the catalyst for the final movements of the play. There is a final, ravishing, change to the space so that all that is left of the original set is a metal frame. The bar is gone. Here is what the site has yielded. The windows of the theatre are unshuttered and opened, the cluttered and close performance space at P.S. 122 unfamiliar, empty and huge. Actors rip the Tyvek paper from the walls, and Carrie and Henry unfurl white beautiful stretches of billowing cloth over the space and over our heads. The space is now a pos-sibility for a different kind of construction. Henry asks Carrie what she sees in the space where Franklin’s house was. Simultaneously, Margaret is questioning Josh. Caroline has not won the Scarlett contest. Josh has decided to compete. Margaret takes him under her wing. He stands in his hoop skirt and Margaret asks him to imagine first that he is on the field of red earth from Gone With the Wind and that his home is Tara and it is burning. And then she tells him to look the other way. Both he and Carrie see open space in the emptiness where the McKinley house was, where the bar was, where Tara was.

MARGARET: What do you see?

JOSH: (In tears) What is it?

HENRY: (To Carrie — the possibility opened by Franklin’s burning). What do you see?

CARRIE: I see open space.

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Figure 4. Frank Boyd as Josh in the Miss Scarlett O’Hara contest with Libby King as Carrie Campbell on top of the set in Architecting by the TEAM, P.S. 122, New York City, 2009. Directed by Rachel Chavkin. (Photo by Nick Vaughan, courtesy of the TEAM)

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JOSH: I see open space.

[...]

JOSH: There’s nothing but open...

MARGARET: You ready to take us out of here Joshua?

JOSH: I’m hot.

MARGARET: Yeah. It’s hot down here. ( Josh begins to remove the dress items. He kicks off the women’s clothes he is wearing and is just standing there at the pageant as the oracle, in his boxers just kinda blank-slate-looking. Meaning that nothing in the world that we have presented thus far fits the new Josh perfectly. The clothes haven’t yet been tailored that the new man should wear.)

[...]

CARRIE: Architecture is all one sees whether inside or out.

[...]

JOSH: And I see all of God’s materials.

MARGARET: (To Josh and Carrie) I think I’m ready.

CARRIE: It will require movement. This will require —

HENRY: This is a dynamic theory of history!

JOSH: I see sand and brick and mortars. (Beginning to get nauseous from the change)

[...]

CARRIE and JOSH: I’m dizzy.

MARGARET: Motion sickness. It’s alright. Burdens are for shoulders strong enough to carry them.

JOSH: And I see fresh water.

CARRIE: It will require movement and tension and texture.

Figure 5. Libby King as architect Carrie Campbell unfurls lengths of billowing white cloth at the end of the play in Architecting by the TEAM, P.S. 122, New York City, 2009. Directed by Rachel Chavkin. (Photo by Nick Vaughan, courtesy of the TEAM)

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6. Chavkin told me that the TEAM borrowed the idea of insouciance from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which company members also read to create this play.

MARGARET: I’m dizzy. (Mammy emerges)

[...]

CARRIE: The supreme aim of any creative activity is architecture; to build is to create events.

JOSH: And I see vegetation of all kinds.

CARRIE: What’s important is that the building have a strong identity.

JOSH: And I see people. Sitting. And waiting. They’re waiting for a plan.

Mammy picks up Margaret “like a baby” and they go off, “over the rubble. And then they do a small dance off into the sunset. Just before they disappear into almost sunken sun we hear them erupt in distant laughter.” Margaret has done her work. She’s accounted for her actions — the poisonous stereotype of Mammy turned into Terror, of the lineage of the archangel Michael, turned into McKinley bearing the traces of the archangel, leading an army of black people back to New Orleans, clearing a space for a for all, a space unlike anything we’ve seen before.

This new space does not mean the negation of or victory over the TND, over development. Even now Carrie still is trying to sell Phoenix Meadows. It doesn’t mean that Caroline isn’t left with her broken dreams of winning the pageant, or that Melly will get her bar back. Nor does it mean the demise of greed for profit. The Scarlett actress is herself going into real estate. It doesn’t even mean the disappearance of Gone With the Wind as a product that will likely resur-face yet again, some new manipulation of the politics of race ultimately used to soothe the sen-sibilities of tolerant consumers. But what it does mean is that in this world of post-Katrina New Orleans, a space can be cleared, an Idea can be seized upon, and its consequences explored. It makes a new present in which all those who will come to the cathedral will live. Even as Carrie tries to make her sales pitch yet again, her developmental logic of time gives way, and she describes cities that “must be constructed out of the precise conditions existing in the present,” and in which “you are looking right now at the past and present and future all at once.” When Henry prompts her again, asking what she sees, she sees the “open space” in which she can, finally, see the cathedral. She’s ecstatic with a conviction about the Idea, herself no longer an architect, the daughter of a famous architect of privatized property built on ruin, but part of the affirmative collaboration of architecting.

CARRIE: [...] and more and more people will come and it will grow into a sort of moaning and chattering — with a sort of murderous in...in...

HENRY: Insouciance?6

CARRIE: (Loving the word) Insouciance. Everyone saying I’m sorry I’m sorry I forgive you I’m sorry...horses will gallop down the aisles... It will be enormous, ENORMOUS. This cathedral. This memorial. This place. Huge. And it will last a thousand years at least. [...] Here...on this ground. In this place. We have no need for genius. Genius is dead. Here we have need for strong hands. For spirits who are willing to give up the ghost, and to put on flesh.

What I’ve written here is a kind of extravaganza, a riff, on this production, a riff obvi-ously deeply indebted to the work of a philosopher who has led me into new kinds of think-ing. Many people I’ve spoken to, while for the most part appreciating the production, have also seen it primarily as a play about race in America. Some have also objected to what they see as its “incorrect” racial politics, such as using an all-white cast, reproducing stereotypes, and so

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on. Additionally, some have objected to its density, the deep layering that, for them, rendered it almost incomprehensible. And so, they’ve asked me, what good does it do to bring philo-sophically informed speculation to “explain” a production when the production itself could not possibly have been read that way by its audiences. Mine is, for them, an explanation that is counterintuitive when the play is obviously specifically about race, and America’s history with race. But I think that Architecting makes a challenge to an audience precisely to think, when watching, outside of many givens, especially those of identitarianisms — that it is pushing on the parameters of habitual reception and the issues audiences believe are the issues for a polit-ical theatre. I believe, in a sense, that it is asking us to give up certain habitual ways of think-ing, that it is, as Chavkin says she means all her plays to be, “a thesis” approached with “that degree of intellectual integrity.” It is a thesis, a brilliant one, that models a new kind of theatri-cal labor. It proposes a new theatrical model, especially for “political” theatre, and a new politics by means of which we, the audience, can begin to read the world differently. Architecting moves theatre making toward, as I’ve said, Alan Read’s suggestion that to make theatre should be to stage an idea of the real, to make an account of the given that “dissolves” the given, and to make “an affirmation of this dissolution as redemptive rather than destructive” (2008:36). Architecting affirms an Idea, a for all, brought forth from the destruction of givens in a site through which what was before un-thought, un-nameable, appears in the world.

References

Adams, Henry. [1918] 1999. The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography. New York: Modern Library.

Badiou, Alain. 2009. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. Trans. Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum.

Brown, Wendy. 2006. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chavkin, Rachel. 2009. Interview with author. New York City, 12 May.

Chavkin, Rachel. 2009. Interview with author. New York City, 19 May.

Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador.

Read, Alan. 2008. Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement: The Last Human Venue. Studies in International Performance Series. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Theatre of the Emerging American Moment. 2009. Architecting. Unpublished manuscript. Dir. Rachel Chavkin. Public Theater, New York, 9–18 January.