The-Team | Alabama Shakespeare Festival
1.334.271.5353 [email protected]

The TEAM

From November 1-20, ASF is hosting the award-winning theatre company The TEAM, a Brooklyn-based ensemble dedicated to creating new work about the experience of living in America today. Currently, The TEAM is developing a new project entitled Reconstruction (Still Working but the Devil Might Be Inside) which is co-directed by Tony Award-winning director Rachel Chavkin (Broadway’s Hadestown) and Zhailon Levingston (Broadway’s Chicken & BIscuits)).

Part of The TEAM’s work is to be in residence in a community, and we are thrilled they will be in residence in Montgomery at Alabama Shakespeare Festival! We invite our friends and neighbors in the community to participate in this creative journey.

The Guardian once described them as “theatrical excavators of American culture, American dreams, and the American psyche.” Combining aggressive athleticism with emotional performances, their work crashes characters from American history and mythology into modern stories, drawing unexpected and sometimes uncomfortable connections across time to touch the raw nerves of the current moment. They devise plays by examining a wealth of material, ranging from existing texts (fiction, theory, drama, etc.) to images taken from visual art and film, and then combining that research with original writing and staging.

Reconstruction (Still Working but the Devil Might Be Inside) is a new theatrical work, with a live musical score about different forms of intimacy — including but not limited to interracial intimacy between Black-identifying and white-identifying individuals, self-intimacy, and Black interiority — within the historical and present-day context of a violently anti-Black United States. Their goal is to make and tour a work that is as useful to racially diverse audiences as the process has been to them as individuals and as a company.

“The process of making this work has carried us, the artists of Reconstruction, into
increasingly transcendent territories as we collectively forge a new language steeped in
music and silence, poetry, fraternities, and sororities, water and ratchet fashion.”
— Rachel Chavkin, Artistic Director, The TEAM.

“Can we actually have an emotionally and artistically equitable process wherein we are asking
white artists to draw upon something they cannot explain and make from that? Because when that
has happened in the Reconstruction room, art that I think is greater than all of our imaginations has been born.”
— Zhailon Levingston, Co-Director, Reconstruction

As part of their three-week residency, ASF is coordinating various events to inform their creative process. They are exploring the region, visiting historic sites, and meeting our community. We hope you will participate in one of their events.

This is a unique chance to contribute to the artistic process. Your presence at the community forum and/or one of the performances will be invaluable to The TEAM’s creative process. We hope you will attend one of these free events and participate in this exciting new show from one of the country’s most respected theaters.

Register online or call the ASF Box Office at 334.271.5353.

RSVP FOR THE TEAM