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Welcome, and thanks for joining me again for Making Conversation, where every week I interview an artist in his or her 30s, who is doing work I find important, and has something illuminating to say about what it means to do what we do as we are now. My name is Chelsea Marcantel, and my guest this week is Margot Bordelon.

Her newest project, AT THE RICH RELATIVES, opens February 10th at Target Margin Theatre.

Margot is a freelance director based in New York City.  She recently graduated from the Yale School of Drama with her MFA in theater directing. Favorite YSD productions include: Sagittarius Ponderosa by MJ Kaufman, Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill, This. by Mary Laws; The Secret in the Wings by Mary Zimmerman; and A Duck On A Bike by Amelia Roper.  Before moving east, Margot spent six years in Chicago working as a director, writer and performer. She is a founding member of Theatre Seven of Chicago, where she co-conceived and directed Yes, This Really Happened to Me; Lies & Liars; and We Live Here.  Margot spent four seasons working at Lookingglass Theatre, where she served as Literary Manager and Company Dramaturg.

www.MargotBordeon.com; headshot by James Banasiak

In Chicago she also worked for such companies as Collaboraction, Timeline, Pavement Group, Hell in a Handbag, and Steppenwolf Theatre, where she assistant directed for both Tina Landau and Austin Pendleton. Margot originally hails from the Pacific Northwest.

And Margot reminds me, for several reasons, of Neko Case.  When I told her that, she said it was the best compliment she’d ever received.

CHELSEA:  So, Margot, how are you today?

MARGOT:  I’m good!  How are you?

CHELSEA:  I’m doing okay!  Um, it’s not bone-chilling cold here for the first time in a couple of weeks.

MARGOT:  Same here, same here.  It’s been 50˚.  It’s been nice today.

CHELSEA:  Excellent.  So, when I asked you, when we were preparing for this conversation, “What labels do you use to describe yourself as an artist?” You answered “dramaturge” and also “new play director,” which I find so interestingly specific.  Why “new play director”?

MARGOT:  Um, I think that I’m finding here, more so than in Chicago, that when I’ve been telling people that I’m a theatre director, especially when they’re not theatre people, they ask me what kind of plays I direct.  And I think what they’re really asking me is if I direct musicals, or Shakespeare plays, or classical plays.

CHELSEA:  Uh-huh.

MARGOT:  None of which are necessarily my passion, but I do have a passion for creating new work.  Even though new work takes a number of different forms.  So really, in a sense, I just started labeling myself as a “new play director” because I feel like that is easy for people to understand.  Especially non-theatre people; it really is a non-theatre-person question to ask, I think.

CHELSEA:  Right.  Well, as a playwright, if someone were to say, “Oh, I’m a new play director,” I would immediately be like, “Let’s go have a lot of beers.  Come with me.  Come with me right now.”  That would be so exciting to me.

MARGOT:  Oh good!  Okay.  Well good.

CHELSEA:  Coming from a playwright’s perspective, I would love to hear that from more people, I think.  Um, how do you describe your artistic style, besides just the label “new play director”?  Has it evolved in your 30s?

Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill; photo credit: T. Charles Erickson

MARGOT:  Yeah, I think it has.  I would say that I have always had a passion for creating highly physical ensemble theatre; I think that’s always been the case, since I was in undergrad to now, um, many years later.  I think what’s really changed about my work is the content that I’m interested in.  So, I think that when I was in my early twenties, I had an insatiable passion for big, gay camp.  I mean, I still do.  I joke that it’s my dream to move to San Francisco and just direct drag shows at Tranny Shack, which is not completely a joke.  I would actually love to do that.  But I think, especially, that was my primary focus in my early 20s.  I loved to do anything that was really over-the-top stylistically, and wildly homosexual, and hilarious.  And I think often the content that fell into that category would maybe be labeled as “fluff.”  Which I also love.  I think, you know, theatre serves different purposes, and entertainment and fluff is very important.  But then, once I moved to Chicago, and I got really involved with this company called 2nd Story—which is a group of actor/performer/writers and also writers who perform—I became really interested in investigating this line between fact and fiction.  And this group of writers were all writing autobiographical personal narratives, and I just started getting really interested in what it would mean to adapt some of that work for the stage, and have actors play these writers who were talking in first person.  But yes—very interested in the line between fact and fiction.  Um, and a lot of the stories also that I was working on with my theatre company that were adapted from 2nd Story stories, just had to do with being a young person, a 20-something, living life in Chicago.  That’s what I was doing at the time, and I was interested in investigating that further.  And then I would say during grad school, my focus has shifted more specifically to: I really want to work on plays that challenge sexual and gender norms.  Which I guess, a little bit, the big gay camp was doing that, in a way.  But I think I have an interest now in doing that more aggressively.  And I think that we just need more of those narratives in our culture right now.  And I think that they are starting to emerge.  And I feel really strongly that I just want to start making work, or continue to make work, that’s unapologetically political, that’s radically feminist.  I still want my work to be accessible, but I want to display my political views in the work that I’m creating.

CHELSEA:  That’s something that I’m hearing more and more from people recently, as we’re growing a little bit older, and growing into our careers… That you feel like you needed to be working all of the time, and then realizing as you get older, that there’s only so much time in a day, there’s only so much time in a year.  And do you—as you’re finding out more about who you are as a person—do you want to be spending time doing things that you don’t agree with or don’t feel passionately about?  The more self-aware of us, I guess, are coming into this age where what we do is as is important as how we do it.  In terms of projects we accept.

MARGOT:  Mm-hmm.

CHELSEA: So, we touched on this briefly just now.  You lived and worked in Chicago, which is where we met, and then you are in New York now.  And in between you were at the Yale School of Drama for your MFA in Directing.  Why did you choose those cities in the order that you chose them?  And how was your work affected in each of those places?

MARGOT:  Okay, yeah.  So, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest.  I grew up in a city called Everett, which is about 25 miles north of Seattle.  And that’s where I went to undergrad, at a wonderful college called Cornish College of the Arts, where I studied acting.  I got my degree in theatre with an emphasis in original work, back in the day when I was an actor.  And I stayed there for a couple of years after I graduated, but I knew that I wanted to move to a bigger city.  And I had gone on this trip back-to-back to New York, and then to Chicago.  And I’d been to New York before, and I loved New York.  And it was my first time to Chicago, and I went in December.

CHELSEA: Oh gosh!

We Live Here by Various Writers; photo credit: Amanda Clifford

MARGOT:  I know!  And I still fell in love with it.  I saw amazing work when I was there: I saw a show at Steppenwolf, I saw a show at Lookingglass, I saw a show at Second City.  And I just thought, like, “Wow.  What an incredible city that has such a range of work that is all so high-quality.  So I applied to an apprenticeship at Steppenwolf, and then eight months later I moved there to do it.  I got an apprenticeship there, working in the Artistic Department.  And I thought, you know, “This will be a good foot in the door,” and it really was.  I still consider Steppenwolf my first Chicago artistic home.  I have so many affectionate feelings toward that company.  And I met a ton of my future collaborators working in that apprenticeship.  And I think what I enjoyed most about Chicago, and what I still love most about Chicago, is that it really felt like an embodiment, for me, of all the ideals that I had learned at Cornish.  All of these values around, um, ensemble, and you know, you’re more powerful as a group, and creating work with people with whom you share an aesthetic.  And I just think that that mentality is epitomized in Chicago theatre.

CHELSEA:  Yeah, that’s the mythos of Chicago theatre.  I think it was Martha Plimpton—again, Steppenwolf—who said something like, “People go to New York to be stars, and they go to Chicago to start a company.”  Or something.

MARGOT:  Totally!  Yeah.

CHELSEA:  I’m paraphrasing, but something like that.

MARGOT:  I think that’s so true, and I think what I’ve found in New York—and, granted, I haven’t been here that long, so I still feel like I’m getting my New York sea legs, and trying to figure out how to navigate this city—but, it does feel like in New York a little bit, everybody’s out for themselves.  Whereas, I never had that feeling in Chicago.  Even though there were a number of different companies, I felt like even those companies really supported one another.

CHELSEA:  Yeah.

MARGOT:  Now I’ve been here, I’ve been on the East Coast for about three and half years, but Chicago definitely still feels like my home.  What has your experience been, being away from it?

CHELSEA:  I still, um, yeah, it still definitely feels like my artistic home, and like a a hometown to me, because there are just so many people there that I miss so much, even people outside the theatre world.  And I actually got what feels to me to be one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever gotten: I went to see The Hypocrites’ Pirates of Penzance at Actors Theatre of Louisville.  So I went and saw it, because we’re a few hours’ driving from Louisville, and I met someone there that was with the production that I hadn’t know before.  A little bit younger than me.  And he said something like, “Oh, I know who you are!  I’ve seen a couple of your short plays.”  And I said, “Oh, great!”   You know, “Thank you.”  And he was like, “I didn’t realize you didn’t live in Chicago.  I thought you lived in Chicago.”  And I thought to myself, “That’s—Let’s just keep that illusion alive.”

MARGOT:  Yeah.

This. by Mary Laws; photo credit: Christopher Ash

CHELSEA:  “Let’s just not let anybody know I moved.  And keep telling new people that I still live there.”  I don’t know why for me that was like a badge of honor.  That people still think I live in Chicago, when I moved two years ago.

MARGOT:  Yeah.  That you’re still a name floating about in the theatre scene there.  And that ‘s great. {pause} So then I ended up leaving Chicago because I applied to grad school, and, yeah, I applied to grad school.  I got into Yale, which, I mean, felt like a dream come true.  And then, yeah, so in the summer of 2010, I moved to New Haven, Connecticut to start school.  And I just graduated last May.

CHELSEA:  So, in Chicago it was really ensemble-based, and then what was it like in New Haven?

MARGOT:  You know, part of the reason that I wanted to go back to grad school was the opportunity to revisit all of these classics that I’d studied in undergrad, but had been so far removed from, at least in my own work since I had graduated.  I was out of school for eight years.  So, I got to go back and study Shakespeare, and Chekhov, and the Greeks.  I got to study some Mozart; I’d never done any opera in undergrad.  And I got to go deeper into artists that I really admired but hadn’t really worked on, like Brecht, like Caryl Churchill.  You know, it was wonderful.  I feel like it was such a gift to be able to go to that program and focus on this thing I’m passionate about for three years.  And I think I’m much more well-rounded, I’m much more confident in my directing than I was before I went in three years ago, and I’ve just been exposed to a wider variety of work.

CHELSEA:  Awesome.

MARGOT:  And now I’ve moved to New York!  And as I was saying earlier, I’ve just always wanted to live in New York, and that’s almost more of a motivating factor for me than, you know, a really strong desire to create work here.  I don’t necessarily feel like I have to be in New York to create theatre, I just want to spend a couple of years of my life living here and having that experience.

CHELSEA:  I feel pretty much exactly the same way, actually.  I sort of feel like New York is ‘the one that got away’ sometimes.  Because I chose Chicago, instead, you know, when I graduated.

MARGOT:  Yeah.

CHELSEA:  I don’t know.  Maybe, still.  You know, I’m not dead yet.  There’s lots of years left.

MARGOT:  I think it’s good.  I’m giving myself two years.  And depending on where I’m at in two years, absolutely moving back to Chicago feels like a total happy option for me.  But I do want to spend a couple of years living here and say that I did.

CHELSEA:  Yeah!  So, now that you have an MFA in Directing, and you have this well-rounded education and all this experience with new work, um, what percentage of the time do you get paid for your work?  And how do you feel about that?  This is something that I struggle with a lot, because sometimes I think to myself, “You know, if I sat down and did the math and figured out how much per hour I actually get paid when I get paid… I would just throw myself out the window.”

MARGOT:  Yeah.  Absolutely.  I was thinking about that for the show I’m working on now.  I think it would come out to fifty cents an hour.  {laughs}  You know?

CHELSEA:  {laughing} Yes!

Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill; photo credit: T. Charles Erickson

MARGOT:   Yes.  I would say, that I get paid for everything that I do now, but it is very rarely a living wage.  So there’s never a time that I don’t have to supplement that in some way.  And I do that by taking on many other types of jobs.  I teach and tutor and I temp—things that begin with Ts.  Babysitting.  I was in Seattle directing something at Cornish, and that was actually a pretty nice fee, but even then it still wasn’t quite enough.  And I was doing some housekeeping at a bed and breakfast, which I actually kind of enjoyed.  It was kind of nice to have a job that was sort of mindless physical labor.

CHELSEA:  Uh-huh.

MARGOT:  So yeah.  I definitely thought that by the time I was thirty-three, which is how old I am now, that I was going to be making my living doing theatre.  Of course when I thought that, when I was, I’d say, 18-22, I don’t think that I had a clear sense of how difficult it is to make your living doing this profession.

CHELSEA:  Right.

MARGOT:  So, I don’t know.  It is depressing, to be totally candid.  But I’m also feeling artistically fulfilled at the moment in the projects that I’m working on, so that keeps me optimistic and moving forward.

CHELSEA:  I know that I feel that tension as well—the tension between expectation and reality, and that’s one of the reasons that I wanted to start conducting these interviews.  Because I kind of looked at my life and thought, “Oh, I’m thirty years old this year, and I’m not exactly… not anywhere near where I thought I would be.”  And everyone tells you that it’s going to be hard, but the only person you know really, is you.  And you think, “Well, I’m a hard worker and I don’t have crazy expectations, and it’ll be different for me because I’m me.”  And you can’t know anything else.  So I think it’s kind of… it’s nice to hear that people I admire have the same tension and have the same sort of shortfall when they look at their careers.  Because I think we’re all still headed up, you know.  It’s definitely a marathon and people drop out every day, but as long as you’re still feeling fulfilled, and still feeling like, “this is where I should be,” then the monetary compensation… doesn’t have to be exactly what you’d hoped.  If that makes sense.

MARGOT:  Yeah, oh yeah.  It totally makes sense.  And you know, I just don’t have… I’m just not driven by material possessions.  And I think that that is helpful {laughs} for me in this particular field, because I do think that the majority of us pursuing a career in theatre have to take a kind of vow of poverty.  And we hope that we don’t really have to hold on to that vow for our entire lives.  But at least for a while.  But I come from very blue-collar people, and I think some ways I don’t have this image of my life with a lot of money.  I’ve never had that, so I almost like don’t know what I’m missing. I mean, do know what I’m missing.  I live in New York City.  I’m surrounded by materialism.  But, I also don’t believe that that’s, you know, the key to happiness.  I don’t think it’s making money.  You know, I want to be able to buy an apartment some day.  I’d like to be able to be married someday.  And all those things cost money.  I don’t necessarily need to have a kid, and I think if I did want to have children, then I’d feel a lot more pressure right now at thirty-three.  You know?

CHELSEA:  Mm-hmm.  Yeah, I hear kids are real expensive.

MARGOT:  Yeah.  Real expensive.  Exactly.  Um, I just try and keep forging ahead, and setting really specific goals for myself.  And just being in New York now, for me it’s like, “Okay, I’m trying to see as much work as possible, I’m trying to meet as many people as I can, especially playwrights, and read playwrights’ plays.”  I don’t know, I guess if I’m really honest with myself, I’m holding out for my big break.  You know?  The ‘big break’ that people get? 

CHELSEA:  Yeah.

This. by Mary Laws; photo credit: Christopher Ash

MARGOT:  And what do they say about theatre?  “You can’t make a living, but you can make a killing”?

CHELSEA:  Yep.  Stephen Schwartz.

MARGOT:  Yeah.  So brilliant.  So I’m waiting for my day when I make a killing.  I would sell out in an instant.

CHELSEA:  Exactly, right?  I would totally sell out!  I mean, I wouldn’t do—I would do something that was super fluffy and meaningless.  I wouldn’t do something that was detrimental to society or, you know, women or anything like that, but, oh yeah.

MARGOT:  I would never do anything that, you know, supported the Republican party or was against any of my political beliefs, but sure.  I mean, I think for directors its difficult because… It’s so interesting.  So many of my peers who are writers and actors, they have, I think, an easier crossover into film and television.  But when you train as a director in theatre, you’re a theatre director.  I don’t feel like I have any of the skills to direct a television show.

CHELSEA:  Yeah, I don’t feel like I have any of the skills to write them.  I mean, I look at a screenplay and it’s like, in a foreign language to me.

MARGOT:  Oh really?  I suppose that’s encouraging to me, then.  Because I feel like “Oh, why couldn’t I have just stayed an actor or a writer, and maybe the crossover into making money would be easier.”  But maybe not.

CHELSEA:  I mean, I would love to take a screenwriting class one day, or writing for television, I mean, it seems to me to be a fun thing to do.  I’m not opposed to it and I definitely don’t think I’m above it in any way.  But I just don’t feel like I know how to do it in any way that’s marketable.

MARGOT:  Right.

CHELSEA:  Where do you hope to be with your art in five or ten years, or even further down the line?

MARGOT:  Well, I think my big fantasy is having my own company that is composed of writers and actors and designers, creating original work that would tour.  I’d love to be creating shows that tour internationally.  I think it’d be a great way to see more of the world.  And I think what I’m working on very specifically right now is just establishing strong relationships with playwrights whose work I really really admire.  I think being a young director, in this country specifically, that is the way to start your career.  You hook up with writers who you really like, and then you continue to work together and you make a kind of regional circuit.  So yeah, I mean I hope that I’m at a place where I’m able to pick and choose my work.  And that work is paying me a living wage!  That’s really my goal.  Five years, if that could be my life, I would be so pleased.

CHELSEA:  Mm-hmm.  I feel you.  I have many of the same dreams.  Especially because… Well, I think this is something that… When I’ve actually spoken to older writers and makers of theatre and told them that this is the system now, as I perceive it: that playwrights and directors who have a similar aesthetic and admire each other kind of hook up and then sometimes come together on a project.  I sent some plays to an artistic director the other day, and I said, “This one’s with this director, and this one’s with this director, we’ve already been working on them.”  In the absence of anyone to produce them, you know, we’ve just been workshopping them and going back and forth because that’s how it gets started.  And it seems to be surprising sometimes because it’s sort of a new system, but for me at least it helps to get the ball rolling on stuff.  So I don’t feel like I’m just working on things all alone and then emailing them out into the void.

MARGOT:  Right.  Yeah, it’s interesting, especially coming out of grad school, I feel like I’ve got maybe five plays that I’m working on with different playwrights right now.  And we’ll have a reading and then, you know, wait for the next thing that hopefully we get into so we can keep working on it.  Unless I had my own company, and then I would be self-producing.  Which, you know, is the dream once I’m established enough.

CHELSEA:  You do have quite a few things in the works right now, from looking at your website (here is the link to MargotBordelon.com).  Tell me about At the Rich Relatives, which is coming up at Target Margin Theatre this month?

A Duck on a Bike by by Amelia Roper; photo credit: Matt Otto

MARGOT:  Yes.  Okay, great.  That piece is a new experimental operetta and it’s co-adapted from a short story by the author Celia Dropkin, who was a turn-of-the-century Russion feminist socialist.  Mallery Avidon, who’s a playwright friend of mine—we went to Cornish together, way back in the day—she adapted it with a composer named Jeff Bryant, who just graduated from CalArts, I believe in their experimental music program.  So, this piece is being produced by Target Margin, as you said, it’s a part of their Beyond the Pale Festival, which is what it’s called.  And what they do each year is produce a series of lab pieces—so we have like five performances, I believe—and they explore different genre.  And this year’s focus is Yiddish literature.

CHELSEA:  Oh cool.

MARGOT:  So it’s a 45-minute piece, the music is incredibly beautiful and interesting.  I think Jeff’s such a talented composer.  The cast is really lovely and wonderful.  We just started staging it.  I have a rehearsal in about an hour, and we’re going to keep staging it.  And it’s just been really fun, and a total delight, and the story it’s adapted from is a beautiful story, and yeah.  I’m excited about it and I’ve never directed an operetta before.  It’s fun.  It’s challenging in all the great possible ways.

CHELSEA:  And what’s on the docket beyond that?

MARGOT:  I’m working on a piece about family legends with Brian Golden, who is the artistic director of Theatre Seven of Chicago.  He was a close collaborator of mine when I lived in Chicago.  It’s an interview piece.  And we’re right in the midst of conducting a number of interviews with a wide variety of people, about stories they were told about their families growing up.  Part of what our interest is, is why particular stories are told in our families, how they evolve, and then how they kind of shape our conceptions of our families, of our communities, of our entire nation.  And, so yeah.  That’s what we’re working on.  We’re in the very beginning stages of that, just interviewing people now and collecting material.  That’s our first step.

CHELSEA:  What’s your biggest artistic goal for the next year, both exterior and then interior, like, how do you want to feel?

MARGOT:  Really, my biggest goal is to build another show from scratch.  The most satisfying artistic experiences I have are when I’m all-in, creating a labor of love.  So I’m hoping that this family legends piece pans out in some way.  I’m really interested in documentary and interview theatre right now.  I want to keep exploring that genre.  So I’m hoping that we in some way get a full production.  That or a workshop production of that.  That’s definitely my goal for the next year: to have created an original piece.  And, oh interior goals?  I just want to feel happy and satisfied with where I’m at in my career and be able to really embrace and love New York.  I feel like I got a kind of beating my first couple of months here; it was a pretty rough first couple of months.  And I want to, yeah, hit my stride in New York.  And you know, there are things that I’m always working on just in general as a person.  I want to find a really good balance between my work life and my personal life.  I want to be a good friend.  And I also want to stay being a really hard worker.

CHELSEA:  This is totally off-topic, but I’ve just always wondered, and just remembered that I have always wondered: your last name, Bordelon, is like kind of common in Louisiana, which is where I’m from.

MARGOT:  Yeah!

CHELSEA:  Is your family from Louisiana?

MARGOT:  Yeah!  My whole dad’s side is from Louisiana.

CHELSEA:  Oh, that makes so much sense to me now.  Because when you said you’re from the Pacific Northwest, I thought, “That’s so odd.”

MARGOT:  Yeah, my grandparents lived in Louisiana until 2002, when my grandfather died, and then my grandmother moved to Virginia Beach to live with my aunt.  But yeah, I have a ton of family down in Louisiana.

CHELSEA:  Mystery solved!  I’m glad that that’s finally cleared up.  For me.

MARGOT:  Yeah.  My dad carries hot sauce around in his bag.

CHELSEA: Oh, a man after my own heart.

MARGOT:  Yeah?

CHELSEA:  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.  And good luck with your rehearsal in less than an hour, and your show at Target Margin Theatre.

MARGOT:  Thank you.

CHELSEA:  And thanks for making conversation.

MARGOT:  Absolutely.  Thank you, Chelsea.