Summary
A multiracial collective of artists interrogates the unfulfilled legacy of the American Reconstruction era while attempting to build a monument to the nation’s complex and ongoing history.
Friday, January 9, 2026 at 7:30 PM Jan 9, 2026, 7:30 PM
Intellectually dense and structurally imposing in the way that good festival work ought to be, because when else can you get away with it? Reconstructing likens the history and continued coexistence of races in America to polyrhythmic music and the interference (sometimes constructive, sometimes destructive) of sound waves echoing around a room.
A meta framing story suggests how this piece came to be over the course of several years—most of the performers, including co-director Rachel Chavkin, Eric Berryman, Modesto Flako Jimenez, James Harrison Monaco, and Jillian Walker, are also credited among 21 writers of the TEAM collective. Inside is another play about the creation of a concept album about escaped former slaves in the Reconstruction era of the late 1860s and -70s, a period noted for its poor documentation in the dominant history books. Each of these layers adds another perspective on the processes of Black and White collaborators, a genre-spanning musicality, and spectacular rearrangements of set pieces to form various Antebellum homes real and fictional. The performers are staying busy up there—the songs are a particular highlight—and we’re never allowed to get too comfortable before we’re yanked back into another level of Reconstructing.
As befits such a complex piece, there were a couple of scenes where I got lost, both in terms of how we got there and how they fit into the overall narrative. There are lots of markers of the multi-year evolution of the project—a count of how many performers stayed with it over time, memorials to deceased collaborators, and such—which an unsympathetic observer could say are a bit indulgent, while a sympathetic one would say they reflect a broader ethos of shared oral tradition, and both would be right. That’s just what kind of thing this is: smart creatives telling stories about themselves and how they came to be in a generous format afforded by a festival stage. Sometimes resonant, sometimes discordant, nearly always interesting.