“I really do believe that my health is physically, spiritually interrelated to the health of others,” Ms. Chavkin said in one of a series of recent interviews, “and so if I’m living in a white supremacist, exclusionary system, then I feel less healthy.”
A latchkey child from an early age, she played a lot of soccer, read a lot of books, and smoked a lot of pot. “I started getting high and doing a lot of drugs with friends from the time I was in middle school through high school,” she said. But she was also editor of the newspaper, editor of the literary magazine, co-editor of the yearbook, co-captain of the soccer team and a valedictorian. “I didn’t want to be bored,” she said.
Her parents took her to theater, at the Olney Theater Center, and the Kennedy Center, plus the now-closed Harlequin Dinner Theater (“you have pot roast and see ‘Dreamgirls’”) and, about once a year, while visiting grandparents, on Broadway. She also spent six life-changing summers at Stagedoor Manor, a theater camp in the Catskills, recalling “I just fell madly in love with it. I don’t look back at those days and go, ‘Those were my halcyon days,’ by any means — the status of the place and the way it played out among the campers is really gross — but I have to acknowledge that it’s probably why I’m in the theater.”
As a theater student at N.Y.U., Ms. Chavkin found herself drawn to the experimental, loving a Sunday night class called “Creating Original Work” in which the only assignment was to be interesting alone onstage for 10 minutes, and discovering the Wooster Group, a mainstay of the downtown avant-garde scene, and realizing “I want that.”
“I lost interest in plays,” she said. “I was like, ‘There are no plays,’ which was a stupid and ignorant thing to say, but that was how I felt.” She thought of acting as like sport, in which she could discern whether someone was “authentically present” by their breathing, their posture, “and whether their body is alive.” She took up postmodern dance.
The decade after graduation was a swirl of odd jobs and theatermaking. She worked at Barnes & Noble, taught at N.Y.U., served as a personal assistant for two psychiatrists, sold beef and bison at a farmer’s market, did some marketing for Adidas. Oh, and she got another degree — a master’s of fine arts — at Columbia.
