Architecting, from American company the TEAM, is a feminist reading of American history. It’s also a lot more multiform and complicated than that. It deals with the post-bellum South, with the abolition of slavery, with the founding of the United States, with the continuing schism in that nation, with Scarlett O’Hara, with Katrina, with dreams and pageants and gas station stores. It deals with what it is to build a nation by blowing it apart. Weirdly, this play is somewhat like a feminist Fight Club, without the blood and fists, but with a lot of the same quixotic elation. 

Carrie Campbell is an architect from New York, she’s a Yankee and it’s her first trip below the Mason Dixon line. Carrie’s travelled to the South to rebuild communities in the wake of Katrina; there she encounters Henry Brooks Adams gluing together a model cathedral, Melanie Hamilton Wilkes running a convenience store, and, last but far from least, Margaret Mitchell, who greets her with the caustic phrase ‘Welcome to America’.

Typically, the TEAM haven’t made a linear narrative. It’s more of a let’s imagine six impossible things before breakfast. Other elements in the mix are a crass Hollywood movie producer, a white man playing a black man, a road trip, a girl who wants to embody Scarlett O’Hara and a boy who wants to embody Scarlett O’Hara, alongside which we have a character who seemingly is Scarlett O’Hara, manifesting from the keys strokes of Margaret Mitchell’s typewriter. Make sense? Good. 

The remarkable thing is that this deconstructive epic actually does make sense. In its examination of black, nigger, negro, confederate and yankee, civil war woman and modern woman, it finds every shade of grey and refuses to simplify American civil rights into right and wrong, black and white. As it draws out and cuts the threads of history and uses power drills to pull apart a prefabricated America, you do feel that the coup de grace it brings about is less a requiem for a dream and more a new beginning, even though presented with the zealousness of a high school gunman.