Last Friday and Saturday evenings, The Rude Mechanicals (The Rude Mechs) performed their original play The Method Gun at the Seeler Studio Theater. The performance by the Austin, Tex.-based ensemble occurred alongside a week-long residency at the College, in which they provided workshops for and gave feedback to students. After seeing the performance, I must admit to being keenly jealous I wasn’t invited to sit in on one of these classes.
The performance began in a rather unorthodox manner, as the troupe had already been on stage walking around beforehand, greeting members of the audience and making slight adjustments to the set. When the flow of people into the theater finally tapered, it was a member of the troupe who took on the role of usher, announcing — in a tongue in cheek way, of course — to the audience to turn off all cell phones and abstain from taking photos.
The play itself traced the nine year training process of Stella Burden’s acting troupe as it prepared Tennessee Williams’ A Street Car Named Desire, although without any of the main characters. Burden, an acting guru who left the troupe early on in the process (she does not appear in the play), was the mastermind of “The Approach,” a dangerous acting method that combines “risk-based rituals” and Western acting methods. The narrative structure of the play is disjointed, and the troupe often broke character to further muddle the line between drama and real life. The fact that Stella Burden is a “truly fictional” character, as the troupe so equivocally put it in a discussion after the performance, adds only another layer to the performance. Indeed, the troupe’s unique ability to infuse traditional elements of story with a heightened sense of self-reflexivity made the performance a one of a kind experience.
I do not think I have ever seen a play that posed lofty, interesting questions in such a farcical, often vulgar way. Aside from the recurring question of what is real within the performance, the play explored the powerful influence certain individuals have in people’s lives and perhaps the distorted images that are then projected onto them. Or I could be totally wrong. That’s the kind of performance this was. The whole production was so open-ended that people will likely read into it in many different ways. What most people will agree to, however, was the absurdity of some scenes, such as when the actors started the performance by practicing crying, or the various scenes in which a vulgar tiger appeared randomly and commented on tangential topics. And of course who could forget the scene in which two male actors walked across the stage completely nude, save a string connected to helium-filled balloons wrapped around their penises.
If I haven’t conveyed this fact in a clear way yet, the play was extremely entertaining from start to finish. Most of the fun came from trying to figure out what was going on in addition to anticipating the next ludicrous thing that would happen. In the end I think it is difficult to convey with words what happens in The Method Gun. While some people might be bothered by this, I believe it is what makes the play interesting and the ensemble exceptional.
