Architecting: Meet the A-team

'CLOSE your eyes everyone!" exclaims Kirsten Sieh. We obey and open them to find the slender young woman standing before us wearing only lots of curls, a wide smile and a stars-and-stripes bikini – and she's holding a huge, elaborately iced cake.

Sieh is a Scarlett O'Hara pageant contestant attempting to bake a name for herself. However, as in several recent America beauty contests, things go spectacularly and rather poignantly awry; the moment is also hysterically funny. For Sieh somehow manages to perform a sort of reverse custard-pie act on herself and is now covered in a patriotic mix of red-white-and-blue frosting – as is the floor and the actor Frank Boyd, with whom she is improvising the scene. Surveying the confectionery wreckage, Sieh groans: "I spent all last night making that!"

We are in a state-of-the-art rehearsal room in New York's financial district, only a few blocks away from Ground Zero. It's an appropriate setting in which to be preparing Architecting, a co-production by the Fringe First-winning, New York-based company, the TEAM and the National Theatre of Scotland Workshop. The show is a requiem for modern America , an ambitious, intellectually challenging political drama that weaves in and out of the country's past, present and future.

Architecting is written by the TEAM – it stands for Theatre of the Emerging American Moment – in collaboration with award-winning Scottish playwright Davey Anderson and American writers Lucy Kendrick Smith and Nathan Wright. It's an unusual experience for Anderson, who is far more accustomed to writing on his own. Indeed, while working on Architecting he has also written Liar for TAG and a short play, Blackout, which has been seen at the National Theatre New Connections Festival, in London, and which will be staged at the Citizens' Theatre, in Glasgow, this autumn.

A prolific writer, he never sits alone in a room at home in Glasgow to write, though. He prefers noisy cafes or even libraries so that he's always surrounded by the buzz of activity. Working with the TEAM has been exciting for him, he says. "I feel energised by it; I think it's really changed the way I think and write and feel about theatre."

"What I most admire about the TEAM is their very real desire to interrogate their national identity, their political psyche as Americans in a very direct way," he continues. "I think that's unusual in the States, although it's something I've always tried to do, like many playwrights of my generation in Scotland. In my own work, I've asked what it is that makes us unique and how that affects how we behave as individuals, while examining the structure of our democracy. This is right at the heart of Architecting, which not only looks at the architecture of buildings but at our own physical architecture as human beings. The play asks what makes us who we are.

"The fact that so many decisions are made at the same time, so that the text informs the physicality and the visual aspects of the piece has been the real revelation. Every rehearsal has felt like an event, because someone would bring in a song they'd written or a piece of animation they'd drawn or a little video they'd made – or even a cake they'd spent a whole evening baking!" Anderson is sitting watching the scene, laptop perched precariously on his knee, as the lively company thrash out ideas and fling themselves athletically around the space.

The TEAM, Anderson says, really do work as a team through months of intensive workshopping. It's a collaboration on all levels, with artistic director Rachel Chavkin and the actors – Sieh, Boyd, Jessica Almasy, Jill Frutkin, Libby King and Jake Margolin – involved in the creative process.

Back in the rehearsal room, as soon as the floor has been mopped clean and Sieh has managed to take a quick shower, Anderson powers up his laptop and we all watch the notorious Miss America contest (the winner did a pratfall] that inspired this scene. When I catch up with the company later, it has changed yet again. Sieh is no longer in a bikini but a dress, and the cake has vanished. The scene may have hit the cutting room floor, but Sieh still gives a damn about winning that southern belle pageant. "We decided it would be impossible for us to bake a big, fancy prop cake every day in Edinburgh," sighs Chavkin, adding that such changes are typical of the way they work. "Scenes you really love just have to go sometimes. We edit and edit and edit."

Many moments lost along the way are still there, though. Anderson says. "Somehow scenes like the slapstick with the cake are still there in the background, informing the text. It's what makes the investigation so rich. It's been really great exercise for my brain."

Now, though, he plans to take some time out since he and his girlfriend are about to have their first baby. "That really will change the way I write, although I've loved this risky, collaborative approach to making new work. There's real safety in numbers."

Despite the trio of writers involved, Architecting is very much in the tradition of the company's previous award-winning devised work, which has been compared to that of the much-fted, New York-based avant-garde troupe, the Wooster Group, seen on the Edinburgh International Festival last year. Hopefully though, Chavkin muses, Architecting will be more Robert Lepage than Elizabeth LeCompte, a reference to the Wooster's legendary director. Last year's TEAM show , the Fringe First-winning Particularly in the Heartland – in which the ghost of the assassinated Robert Kennedy and a girl called Dorothy turned up in present-day, dirt-poor Kansas – was certainly under the influence of the Woosters, Chavkin concedes.

She and her newly-formed company exploded onto the Fringe in 2006, winning a raft of four-star reviews and a Fringe First for the immediacy and energy of their vision, wildly physical acting style, and politically astute, savagely satirical script for Give Up! Start Over! (In the Darkest of Times I Look to Richard Nixon for Hope), about a woman who appears to have swallowed her TV set and is channelling Richard Nixon.

Architecting is layered, onion skin-like, with literary and political references to Margaret Mitchell's epic novel Gone With the Wind and therefore to the American Civil War and the period of Reconstruction that followed the conflict. It explores themes of nation building and feminism, as well as introducing characters such as a contemporary anarchist architect and a Presidential grandchild.

A time-bending epic , Architecting began life as a staunchly feminist piece, a duet between two actresses, Chavkin says. The original title was Three Simones Walk into a Bar (that's de Beauvoir, not Nina); then it was renamed Thanks For Coming Home, Carrie Campbell. This character – an architect and a would-be terrorist who plots to blow up a new suburban neighbourhood development – remains integral to the piece, which also imagines that the film of Gone With the Wind is being remade now.

But it was only when the company did a National Theatre of Scotland workshop, in Glasgow, that the show became Architecting. "That was when we came up with the idea of bringing in Margaret Mitchell – the daughter of a tremendous suffragette in Atlanta – and Scarlett O' Hara and Henry Adams," says Chavkin.

Henry Adams? "He was the grandson of John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States, and a proto-feminist, a 19th-century historian who wrote that it was western culture that imposed quasi servitude on women," replies Chavkin.

"See what I mean?" chips in Anderson. "It's been an education."

Architecting is at the Traverse, Edinburgh, from 1-24 August, with a preview performance today.