MAKING THE PICTURE: An Interview with the Creative Team

A conversation between Lempicka authors Carson Kreitzer and Matt Gould, director Rachel Chavkin, choreographer Raja Feather Kelly and the Playhouse’s Director of Artistic Development, Gabriel Greene

GG: Carson, what was the original spark for this show? How did you become aware of Tamara de Lempicka’s work, and what made her life feel like a musical?

CK: I’ve spent most of my life writing about women I wish I had known about when I was growing up. Women whose stories have been ignored, or deliberately buried, because they challenge the dominant order. Complicated women, even female “anti-heroes”… Men have been allowed a complexity that we often deny our female characters. I think it’s important to fill in the record – the full humanity of half of humanity. Tamara de Lempicka was brought to me by a friend who said, “You are going to love her; she’s one of your women.” I got the Taschen art book and immediately saw her painting [“Tamara in the Green Bugatti”], and I thought, “Oh, right – I know this!” I knew a lot of her paintings but I didn’t know her. I didn’t know her incredible life story. And that just grabbed me immediately: this one woman had been at the intersection of all of these pivot points in the 20th century. She was 17 or 19 in the Bolshevik Revolution – she lied about her age, so we don’t know; that’s one of the things I love about her – and then 20 years later, she’s in Paris in the lead up to World War II. Just thinking of all that history overlaid on a single life is so powerful. And it seemed like a musical because of her work: it’s so extreme, so vibrant, so beyond reality.

Artist Tamara de Lempicka seen here with her painting Portrait of a Man, a painting of her husband Tadeusz; Creator: Therese Bonney; Credit: AFP/Getty Images.

MG: Tamara’s work sings.

CK: Matt and I met in the Composer/Librettist Studio at New Dramatists. It’s described as “not a songwriting workshop, but a workshop on collaboration in which you happen to write songs.” You write songs with different people over the course of two weeks. Matt and I were the first pairing, and I pretty much knew right then that I just wanted to tackle him about the knees and see if he wanted to write this musical with me.

GG: Because you’re both Jewish Geminis?

CK: That did come up immediately, somehow. But of course it was his music, which is breathtaking, and the way we just clicked. I’ve always been a pretty poetic writer, and when Matt set my words to music, suddenly it all made sense. It just felt like, “Oh. This is what I’m supposed to be doing.”

RC: What year was that?

MG: Probably somewhere around 2009, maybe?

CK: That sounds right.

RFK: That was also the year I was born. [laughter]

MG: The first song we wrote together was about a mom with a little baby named Miles. And Mom was an actress and brought her baby everywhere, and somehow Carson’s very heightened, poetic way of expressing herself synthesized with my very emotional style of writing. And it was kind of beautiful; strangely complicated but strangely simple. And I was like, “There’s something there.”

GG: Matt, when Carson figuratively tackled you about this musical, what made you want to do it?

MG: Everybody wants to make a musical about everything, and most of the ideas don’t warrant "This is a musical!". I think musicals are just inherently poetic. So even if they’re very intimate, subtle, small pieces, they have to somehow lift out of kitchen sink drama into the realm of poetry – just by nature of the fact that we’re singing, which is crying, which is laughing, which is celebrating and mourning. When I looked at [Lempicka’s] paintings, there was something heightened about them, something grand. I always hear music in my head; I never thought that was a weird thing until I got older and other people said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And when I saw those paintings, I thought, “Oh, there’s music in this.” I really do think of musicals as a microcosm for the world: can a group of disparate people with different ideas and different perspectives on the same story all come together and tell that story. Because if we can’t do it, there’s no hope for the rest of the world. Carson and I, despite the fact that we’re both Gemini Jews, approach our work extremely differently. And simultaneously there is an extreme respect and admiration for what the other one does. She’s someone I feel like I can work on community with and try to find out if we can make the world work together.

Self-Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti), 1929 ©Tamara de Lempicka Estate, ARS 2022.

GG: What was the music you heard when you saw Lempicka’s paintings, and how has it evolved to the music in the show?

MG: I write instinctively. For this particular piece, Carson’s words are the seed of inspiration. I’m more of a chef than an analytical composer. By which I mean, I’m working with given ingredients that I have to put together in the tastiest way. In this piece, you’re going to get some pop, you’re going to get certain allusions to period, you’re going to get some contemporary musical theatre…

RC: …there’s some machinery…

MG: It’s what Tamara did, too – she wasn’t painting in one style, she was drawing on many inspirations, and I think that’s partly why this piece resonates so much now. There is nothing new, and so artists are drawing on Andy Warhol and Madonna and Beyoncé and Mozart and August Wilson and Josephine Baker – we’re drawing on all of these threads of different pieces. It’s a collage onstage.

GG: Rachel and Raja, at what point did you join this world?

RC: It was 2014. I’d just directed a show at Yale Rep [which co-commissioned Lempicka with New Dramatists] and they called to say I should read it. At that point there was already a full draft. And I loved what I was hearing, and I started seeing these drops of colored silks and a stage suddenly filling with [Lempicka’s] color. I talked to Carson and Matt about that, and showed them some pictures, and we really dug each other.

CK: You were really into the Bolsheviks.

RC: I love the Bolsheviks!

CK: So that just felt, like: “Here we go! She gets our Bolsheviks!” [laughter] RC: So then, for a whole series of reasons, I lost sight of the show, though I know these two cats were really busy in the intervening years. And then in 2017, Williamstown Theatre Festival and I were talking about what I might do there at the festival, and they committed to doing Lempicka in the summer of 2018. So that was the first full production of it.

RFK: I came on board before it went to Williamstown. The way I was interviewed by the three of them made me feel very challenged, which was exciting to me. I thought, “Oh, they’re really serious about this.” I found Carson to be an essayist and a poet at the same time. I was a poetry major, so I felt a kinship to the way that Carson bends words. And the music – I had never heard music quite like Matt’s. And Rachel is a very determined, thoughtful person who isn’t afraid of digging and pushing – or to use words I like, to “celebrate and interrogate.” This was an opportunity to both tell a story, but be super queer; to be extravagant, but also pay attention to craft and rigor. The music is a dream for anyone who wants to move anything on stage.

RC: And Raja talked to us about “shouldering.”

RFK: Yes, épaulment. It’s a head and neck positioning that essentially creates the longest line in the body. In ballet, it was used to show respect to commissioners who’d give diamonds to the ballerinas; to show their appreciation, they’d gesture with their shoulders. Now, it’s used to create and add dimension – to see the body differently. It’s very elegant and beautiful, and it’s in many of Tamara’s paintings. In thinking about the movement, I thought, “If anyone choreographs this and they don’t start with épaulment, then it’s going to be ruined.” That’s normally how I decide if I want to join a production: if I think someone else is going to ruin it. [laughter]

CK: Raja, I like that you said “craft and rigor.” As Matt said, we have very different approaches to work, but we could immediately see that the other cared as much about the precision of the work, and that’s where we really click. If there’s something we’re not meshing on, we know it’s a really important thing we have to figure out and come together on.

RC: I think it’s also important to say that Carson and Matt are the most committed and rigorous revisers I’ve ever encountered. It’s jaw-dropping, and that has continued even through the pandemic.

GG: How did Lempicka change over the last two years, as the world changed so much?

MG: Sometimes, as artists, you think you’re in front of the work; you’re in the control seat. And then life happens, and you look at something you’ve been working on, and you realize the work has actually been ahead of you the whole time. It’s leading you, pushing you. Carson and I always talked about, “Oh, this is the right time for Lempicka.” There’s an African American president, this is the right time. Hillary Clinton didn’t get elected, this is the right time. The pandemic was a time for everybody to stop and look at the world, look at our lives, our homes, our children, our families, our governments, and to just ask, “What are we doing?” I think the time gave Carson and me – and everyone on the team, honestly – a lot of time to re-look at the piece and say, “Now that we know the work has been in control the whole time, how do we better serve what the work has been asking for?” We’re trying to honor Tamara’s work, which was striving for a certain kind of precision. And we learned there were places where we had not honored her yet, where we had not honored what the work wants yet.

CK: Matt and I are very sonically precise, and we’ve been working on language and music and how it sounds. Now, to be in the rehearsal room and to see Rachel and Raja work their magic, and to see Rachel pop up from the table during a read-through and start moving set pieces around on the model, creating the thing in her mind… I am not so much a visual person, so I get such joy out of seeing the thing blossom in three dimensions on bodies in space. We are finally making the picture.

Eden Espinosa as Tamara de Lempicka in Williamstown Theater Festival's 2018 production of Lempicka; photo by Daniel Rader