But she was always creating shows — weird, ambitious, inspired by reading and a curiosity that took her from bebop music to the theory of relativity. Her collaborations with fellow N.Y.U. grads led to the formation of a company, the Team, where she is still the artistic director today. She also fell in love, on a Team trip to Scotland, with a theater electrician from Iowa; she and Jake Heinrichs have been together since 2005, and married since 2011; he is now a lighting supervisor at the Signature Theater, and they live in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Her work outside the Team took off after a 2010 production of “Three Pianos,” a boozy song cycle riffing on the work of Franz Schubert. She directed it at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater; it then got picked up by New York Theater Workshop, won an Obie, and Ms. Chavkin was on her way.

When one of the writers of “Three Pianos,” Dave Malloy, embarked on a long-shot quest to fashion a musical from a 75-page section of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” he again turned to Ms. Chavkin to direct. “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” was a sensation from the moment it opened Off Broadway at Ars Nova, and four years later it arrived on Broadway. It lasted 10 months before closing amid a social media frenzy over the financially shaky production’s decision to replace a black performer with a more famous white performer in a starring role.

Ms. Chavkin said she learned several lessons. On a mundane level, she is being more mindful of weekly running costs, eliminating a pyro effect from “Hadestown” to keep the budget down; on a cultural level, she is less dismissive of the power of social media; and on a psychological level, she said, she feels “a lack of solidity” that has made her far more protective of “Hadestown.”

But “Great Comet” earned Ms. Chavkin a Tony nomination and brought her visceral directing style to the attention of new audiences.

Mr. Groban, its original Broadway star, recalls meeting her and thinking, “This is a human being who reminds me of all the reasons why I was excited to get into theater at a young age.”

Now, he says, “I would follow this person anywhere.”

Among those who saw “Great Comet” in its first production was a Vermont singer-songwriter, Anaïs Mitchell, who had recorded a concept album about a Greek myth that had long intrigued her. That album was “Hadestown,” and Ms. Mitchell was looking for a director who could help her shape it into a full-fledged stage musical.