Reconstructing (Still Working But The Devil Might Be Inside)

Onstage is a 2-story house. From one angle, it’s mucked out after a flood. From another, it’s a new development wrapped in Tyvek. From another, it’s Gone with the Wind’s “Tara” being transformed into an AirBnb. Sometimes it looks like it’s on fire. Performers and audience weave in and around the house, the setting and landscape for Reconstructing (Still Working but the Devil Might Be Inside).

Helmed by the TEAM’s biggest writing collective yet (21 artists, aged 28-98, 14 of whom are artists of Color and 7 of whom are white-identifying), Reconstructing is a new work that explores intimacy between Black-, POC- and white-identifying Americans and seeks, meta-theatrically, to answer the question of how, in the aftermath of slavery, we might “move through history together.” (Artist Eric Berryman). It has a double-helix structure: one strand, the primary scaffolding, is a transcript-based play that tells the story of our creative process; the other strand, weaving in and around the first, is a collage of movement, music, and poetic, character-based scenes. Formally, we think it might feel like a dance, or like Alice Childress’ Trouble in Mind, Anne Washburn’s 10 out of 12, or even Noises Off.

The piece slips between fact and fiction, performance and ritual, process and product, as our artist selves co-exist with historical figures like William Byrd (considered “founder” of Richmond, VA, an enslaver and astonishing diarist) or fictional characters like Professor Lowe (a college professor studying the correlations between astrology and Black uprisings). It’s about characters seeking and fleeing intimacy and about us as makers doing the same.