‘Imagining Rachel’
She channels Rachel Carson in wild one-woman show
Elise Robertson is embarrassed to admit that the first time she stumbled across Rachel Carson’s name wasn’t while growing up in Western Pennsylvania. The Franklin Park native is now a veteran actor, director and writer based in Los Angeles. Carson first appeared on Robertson’s radar while she researched a potential film project that she could write for herself.
She noticed some striking similarities between herself and Carson, including their Scottish roots, that Carson grew up in nearby Springdale and their reverence for the natural world.
But it was what the two didn’t have in common that led Robertson to develop “Imagining Rachel,” a onewoman Zoom show in which she explores Carson’s life while occasionally showing bits of her own.
“There were all these parallels ... but she sort of went a whole different way,“Robertson told the Post-Gazette. “She was laser-focused right from the get-go and extremely confident. She was supported and never faltered. She went that direction and never stopped, and I feel like I just didn’t.”
You can catch Robertson’s two-hour experiment in pandemic-era storytelling through Monday via the Edinburgh Festival Fringe’s on-demand screening system at edfringe.com/whatson/imagining-rachel. Robertson said that the Festival Fringe may extend the digital availability of “Imagining Rachel.” She’s also touring with it to other festivals and hopes to eventually expand it into a live performance.
Robertson is a North Allegheny High School graduate who began her Hollywood career as a model-builder and scenic designer on stop-motion animation projects like Tim Burton’s 1993 musical “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and the 1997 sci-fi adventure “Starship Troopers.” Since then she has directed a feature-length film, 2011’s “Donner Pass,” and acted in everything from the 2014 film “American Sniper” to TV shows ranging from “Arrested Development” to “This is Us.”
She’s currently in the United Kingdom filming a series for Amazon Prime Video.
“Imagining Rachel” was originally intended to be a one-woman theater piece that Robertson hoped to turn into a feature film. She pivoted to Zoom because of the pandemic and after taking a class on solo performing with actor and playwright Ann Noble through Los Angelesbased Berg Studios. That experience taught her a lot about how “we communicate in this box as opposed to the stage.”
Her setup is essentially a chair, two desktop screens, and props on shelves and hooks. The desktop screens are angled so that she can appear on either individually or both at the same time. Robertson also mounted her screens on a camera slider that allowed her to move them back and forth. She credited her background as a modelbuilder for figuring out how to shoot it alone.
“When I saw that Zoom box, it was just another problem to solve in my brain. That’s sort of who I am and how I think.”
— Elise Robertson
“You’re always looking for ways to finagle things, so I got really good at that,” she said. “When I saw that Zoom box, it was just another problem to solve in my brain. That’s sort of who I am and how I think.”
The show is split between Robertson chronicling Carson’s biography and achievements while also revealing details of her own upbringing. She darts between each screen to play both parts.
One of the more fascinating juxtapositions she creates is how Carson “never saw being a female as a drawback,” while Robertson was raised from a young age to believe “if women were able to succeed, that’s because they were so special.
“It was something I grew up with, a learned value system that wasn’t anyone’s fault but was just the way it was in my world,” Robertson said. “It’s only been through a lot of reflection that I’ve been able to come to terms with it.”
A lot of time in “Imagining Rachel” is spent on Carson’s efforts to protect the environment, most famously through her 1962 book “Silent Spring.”
“She started this new philosophy of thinking about the connectivity of ourselves with the environment,” Robertson said. “There isn’t us and the environment. We’re just part of it. Once you realize that you can’t just pollute and throw pesticides everywhere ... She was the first one to really make that a cornerstone of her philosophy and speak against the chemical companies.”
Carson’s name is still well- represented in her hometown, thanks to namesakes like the Rachel Carson Bridge and direct attempts to preserve her legacy like the Rachel Carson Homestead in Springdale and the Rachel Carson EcoVillage on the Eden Hall Campus of Chatham University,
her alma mater.
But Robertson isn’t sure how many Pittsburghers actually know what she’s famous for and posited a potential decades-spanning reason for that.
“There were a lot of people in Pittsburgh who felt like Rachel Carson was the enemy of industry,” she said. “Now, she’s revered as a goddess of the environment. At the time, she was very controversial. There were a lot of people who thought she was hysterical and overreacting. ... They found all these ways to deride her and her conclusions. But she had done her research so thoroughly.”
Through “Imagining Rachel,” Robertson hopes to debunk those notions while showcasing two talented and accomplished Pittsburgh women — herself included.
“I hope the show is a love letter to growing up in Pittsburgh,” she said. “I think people in Pittsburgh will get more out of it than most because of that.”