Video Teaser for The Method Gun by the Rude Mechanicals on OnTheBoards.tv

Found via Tweet from the Rude Mechanicals:

[Apple users: can't see the video? Click to go to Vimeo.com]

Vimeo legend: Rude Mechs' The Method Gun filmed as part of OntheBoards.tv, a contemporary performance on-demand site.

The Method Gun explores the life and techniques of Stella Burden, the actor-training guru of the 60s and 70s and creator of “The Approach” (referred to as “the most dangerous acting technique in the world”), which fused Western acting methods with risk-based rituals to infuse even the smallest role with sex, death, and violence. Using found text from the journals and performance reports of Burden’s company,The Method Gun reenacts the final months of her company’s rehearsals for their nine-years-in-the-making production of A Streetcar Named Desire. The Method Gun addresses the ecstasy and excesses of performing, the dangers of public intimacy, and the incompatibility of truth on stage and sanity in real life.

Since 1995, Rude Mechs has created a mercurial slate of 23 theatrical productions that represent a genre-defying cocktail of big ideas, cheap laughs, and dizzying spectacle. What these works hold in common is the use of play to make performance, the use of theaters as meeting places for audiences and artists, and the use of humor as a tool for intellectual investigation. The company tours these performances nationally and abroad; maintains The Off Center, a performance venue in Austin for arts groups of every discipline; and operates a year-round arts mentoring program for teenage girls.

This performance was filmed at Imago Theater as part of Portland Institute of Contemporary Art's Time Based Art Festival.

Jeremy M. Barker comments on CultureBOt.net, "OtB.tv uses multiple high-quality digital video cameras and quality editing to present video documentations that’s several steps above what most of us are used to. It’s $5 to watch or $15 to download and own; other subscription options are available."

Reviews from Elsewhere: The Method Gun, Rude Mechs, Mention in Scott Brown's 'Best of 2011' in New York Magazine, December 4

Via link tweeted by the Rude Mechs:

The Off Brand

Some of the best shows came and went in a flash.

By Scott Brown, December 4, 2011

It’s fashionable to write off Off and Off–Off Broadway—hey, I do it all the time, for fun and profit. But 2011 made that a difficult proposition: My favorite shows of the year, as a bloc, were those wee, untransferable gems and oddities from smaller theaters throughout the city, the sorts of shows that regularly blow in and out of town in two-week runs. Most of the time, frankly, two weeks is far too generous a cushion. Not this year, not for these ephemeral, yet unforgettable events.

I’ve made Sweet and Sad my No. 1 pick for 2011, but it’s just a tributary to a giant, churning underground reservoir of nanoscale theater-art. I thrilled at a revival of Howard Barker’s furious Restoration anarch-omedy Victory: Choices in Reaction, starring the great Jan Maxwell, which spoke directly to our present viciousness, revanchism, and social cannibalism. The Method Gun, a nothing-short-of-magical mousetrap rigged by Austin’s excellent Rude Mechs troupe, purported to tell the story of an acting guru named Stella Burden and her cultlike teaching techniques, but really massaged the old American ache for purity in theory and practice—and made the stakes of an elaborate theater-game feel like life and death. [. . . .]

Click to read full text at New York magazine. . . .

Reviews from Elsewhere: Oregon Arts Watch on The Method Gun, Rude Mechanicals, September 13

Published at the Oregon Arts Watch:

TBA:11/ Rude Mechs, ‘The Method Gun’: art and self-reflection

By Brett Campbell ⋅ September 13, 2011

I approached the Rude Mechs show The Method Gun with some skepticism. I generally detest art about art, with its usual insider references (or so I thought) and the premise sounded oh-so-meta: a theater piece about a theater company’s staging of a theater production. Happily, the Austin-based company merely used the subject matter as a vehicle to do what the best theater always does: tells us about who we are and why we do what we do. In giving us a deliciously deceptive story about art, they’re telling us about ourselves, artists and non artists alike.

It’s really a story about an absence — though not the big lacuna alleged in the story, which concerns a famous (though fictional) theater director named Stella Burden, who devised a way of making theater more real called “The Approach,” and if this sounds suspiciously like a famous nonfictional Stella (Adler) and “The Method” she created, it’s hardly an accident. (As for the surname, I wonder if it references the Los Angeles artist Chris Burden, who wanted to make art with so much impact that he staged a performance in which a collaborator actually shot him. He survived and is happily making art to this day; I visited his Los Angeles studio a few years ago, where he was making a big installation involving old lightposts.)

Stella B’s conceit is to stage a version of A Streetcar Named Desire — without Stanley, Stella, Mitch or Blanche. Like them, Burden never appears in The Method Gun. The show is about the actors she left behind, somewhat like Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is about the bit players in Hamlet. “She gave us ourselves, and now we don’t even have that,” one wails.

Read more at Oregon Arts Watch . . . .

Reviews from Elsewhere: The Rude Mechs' Method Gun at Yale, February 25

Thanks to a Tweet from the Rude Mechs:

Excerpts:

The Rude Mechs' The Method Gun - review

By Christopher Arnott
Friday, February 25, 2011 11:35pm

[. . . .] The Rude Mechs' touring production of The Method Gun has one final performance at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 8 p.m. Saturday Feb. 26. If you miss it here, you can still catch it next week in New York City.

It’s nice to finally see (thanks to Yale’s undergraduate Theater Studies department’s World Performance Project series and the graduate Yale School of Drama) a company from Texas that I’ve been hearing and reading about for years, and to find that they’re as good as the advance word suggested. The Rude Mechs come off as a genuine ensemble, a tightly-knit collective with a unified vision. The Method Gun is funny, bleak, satirical and serious in equal parts, so well-balanced and timed that you trust it implicitly and just follow along without questioning its intentions.

[. . . .] But The Method Gun’s brilliance is that, in questioning how far you can take artistic theory, it humanizes the process rather than turning it into a cartoon. Streetcar is a real play, but the situation Rude Mechs has invented concerns a mysterious directorial theorist whose own method, dubbed “The Approach,” out-methods any method heretofore known. It opens up an exploration of control, security and danger in how theater is created and performed. Creative staging effects and play-within-play-within-play mindfucks take those very elements a few stages further. Yet there’s enough of a plot structure, character development and comedy for the intermissionless evening to be thoroughly entertaining on top of all that metatheatrical mysticism.

[. . . .] Self-referential ensemble projects about the meaning of theater aren’t that uncommon, and I’d be hard pressed to call The Method Gun original. I’m not even sure it wants to be. Swinging lights, male nudity and animal costumes are part of the arsenal of any small regional theater company. What matters is that these effects are perfectly utilized, carefully chosen, craftily implemented to refresh, amuse or confound at just the right moments. While there is a groupthink at work here, it’s important to note that The Method Gun began with a script by company co-founder Kirk Lynn and benefits from exquisite technical design (particularly for a touring piece—fitting any outside work onto the oddly wide, curtainless Yale Rep stage is a trick in itself, yet this piece looks like it could have been created there.)

Click to view full review at the New Haven Advocate . . . .

Reviews from Elsewhere: Robert Faires on the Rude Mechanicals' Method Gun at Humana Festival

Published by the Austin Chronicle on April 1:

Humana Festival of New American Plays

How Austin looked on the national stage

by Robert Faires

[. . . ] This latest Method Gun – the "10% sadder version," claims playwright Kirk Lynn – played in a 160-seat black box with audience on three sides, and whether it was that space's heightened intimacy, my own familiarity with the material, or a tightening of the show, the Humana staging moved me more than any version I'd seen. Cast members Thomas Graves, Hannah Kenah, Lana Lesley, Jason Liebrecht, and Shawn Sides keep getting deeper under the skins of the misfit disciples of acting guru Stella Burden, who, after she abandons them, question what they've learned and how to finish the project they've been rehearsing for nine years: a version of A Streetcar Named Desire that omits Blanche, Stanley, Stella, and Mitch. The Method Gun has always struck me as being more about how to live than how to act – whenever its characters express anxiety about behaving the right way "onstage," I hear "in the world" – and that hits home more poignantly with each viewing. [. . .]

Read full review at AustinChronicle.com . . . .

Arts News: Rudes' Method Gun Scheduled for Humana Festival, March 2010

Found on-line:

The Rude Mechanicals' Method Gun, written by Kirk Lynn, will be featured at the month-long 34th annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors' Theatre in Louisville. Performances run from March 16 - 28; Saturday performances during the run have already sold out.

The festival is sponsored by a generous grant from the Humana Foundation. Further information is available at the Humana Festival website.

2009 Grants from NEA to Rude Mechs, Rupert Reyes, EmilyAnn,

Austin theatre arts are supported by four 2009 grants just announced by the National Endowment for the Arts.

- - $10,000 under the category Access to Artistic Excellence to Sul Ross University in Alpine, Texas, for the production of Rupert Reyes ' piece Petra's Sueño (first done here last year by Teatro Vivo). To support the Bilingual Theatre Festival and the production of Petra's Sueño by Rupert Reyes. Contributors from the Latino and Chicano theater community and members of the National Association of Latino Artists will participate in the project.

- - $15,000 under the category Learning in the Arts to EmilyAnn Theatre in Wimberley. To support Shakespeare Under the Stars, a summer youth theater program. High school students will learn all aspects of performance and technical theater through this hands-on program.

- - $20,000 under the category Access to Artistic Excellence to the Rude Mechanicals. To support a national tour of The Method Gun, an original, company-developed work. The piece will explore the life, ethos, and techniques of a fictional actor-training guru as recounted through the eyes of her students.

Grants also go to the Austin Classical Guitar Society ($40,000 for lessons for the disadvantaged and support for school curricula) and to Conspirare ($30,000 to support a compact disc recording of a new choral-orchestral work by composer Eric Whitacre. The concert-length oratorio will merge classical, jazz, and rock idioms).

Click here for a complete list of grants newly announced for Texas organizations.

The Method Gun, Rude Mechanicals at the Off Center, April 9 - May 2

So what, exactly, is the Method Gun?

The short, obvious and wrong answer is that it's the loaded pistol that is secured in a birdcage by a troupe of intense, troubled actors. And like any loaded pistol that features in stage action, it will, eventually be used (cf., "the loaded gun theory").

That piece of hardware is a gun, but it's not The Method Gun except in a very minor, representational way.

The ensemble makes us at home for the show, opening the house early and providing piano music, a compendium of sentimental ballads keyed out carefully by a cast member. "Stardust," "Red Sails in the Sunset, "Alfie," "I Will Wait for You," pieces relatively appropriate for the early 1970s setting of the action, played about as well as I might play them after 30 years away from the keyboard.

Click to Read More on AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: The Method Gun and Tenebrism, Rude Mechanicals, April 9 - May 2

UPDATE, April 19: CLICK for ALT review of The Method Gun

UPDATE, April 1: Click image for Rude Mechs' dumb "Tiger" promo video (1:30 -- one of five versions posted on YouTube)

UPDATE, April 14: Jeanne Claire van Ryzin's pre-opening piece in the Statesman's Austin360 "Seeing Things" blog



From the Rude Mecs, March 4:

THE METHOD GUN
a project of Creative Capital
at The Off Center
April 9 - May 2, 2009 (Thurs - Sun @ 8 pm) No performance Sunday, April 12th

MAKE YOUR RESERVATION NOW!

written by Kirk Lynn
directed by Shawn Sides
featuring: Thomas Graves, Heather Hanna, Jude Hickey, Hannah Kenah and Lana Lesley

”Nothing short of the best work this theater collective has done in its 13 years as it has carved out its well-respected reputation on the international indie theater scene...This is the Rude Mechanicals doing what they do best: crafting a rich series of stunning and surprising visual moments, lacing those moments with kinetic physical movement and wrapping it all together with a script both lyrical and cheeky.” — Austin American-Statesman

“The ‘final performance’ of Burden’s Streetcar features a characteristically Rude-ish blend of physicality and audaciousness... so precisely timed, so crisply executed... almost hypnotic.” — Austin Chronicle "Top 10 Theatrical Treasures and Pleasures of 2008" — Austin Chronicle

"In the arts, the Eight from '08" — Austin American-Statesman

In preparation for our Spring 2010 national tour, Rude Mechs is proud to present a revisited, reworked and recast encore performance of our original play, this time on our home turf, The Off Center.

The Method Gun explores the life, ethos, and techniques of actor-training guru, Stella Burden, as recounted through the eyes of her students. Ms. Burden’s training technique, The Approach, fused Western acting techniques and more dangerous METHODS in an effort to infuse even the smallest of roles with SEX, DEATH and VIOLENCE.

We promise: guns, pendulums, “Streetcar,” and physical danger. We make no claims on behalf of narrative, common sense, or safety.

Using found text from the journals and performance reports of Stella Burden’s company, “The Method Gun” re-enacts the final months of her company’s rehearsals for their nine-years-in-the-making production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Stella left the company under mysterious circumstances in 1972. Diaries and letters from actors in the company express a sense of desperation, inadequacy, and frustration inherent to the process of creating meaningful work for the stage and in everyday life.

Set amid swinging pendulums and talking tigers, “The Method Gun” bounces between interior monologues, rehearsal sequences of “Streetcar,” and group interactions - all gleaned from historical documents - to express a longing for the return of inspiration and a more believable presentation of self in everyday life. Click here for a production history, reviews of the April 2008 production, photos, video clips and more.

ATTENTION FUSEBOX PASSHOLDERS!!!
The Method Gun will also be featured in The Fusebox Festival (April 23 - May 2) alongside new works from Rotozaza, Forced Entertainment and tEETH, as well as works from Nature Theater of Oklahoma, local heroes Rubber Repertory and showings from LeeSaar the Company. We will accept a limited number of Fusebox Passes each night of the festival. To make your reservation, secure the passholder password from Fusebox and make your reservation using the Brown Paper Tickets link above. Select "Fusebox Pass" as your ticket type. You must arrive at the box office no later than 7:45 pm with your pass and valid ID in hand. Unclaimed passholder reservations will be released at 7:45 pm each night.

The Method Gun has received support from Creative Capital Foundation, Rockefeller MAP Fund, The Orchard Project, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Humanities Institute and The Harry Ransom Center. Rude Mechs is supported by the Texas Commission on the Arts and the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division.

TENEBRISM
featuring Jeremey Catterton and Jayne Deis

THREE NIGHTS ONLY!!!
April 16 - 18, 2009 (Thurs - Sat @ 10:30 pm) each night after The Method Gun at The Off Center

CLICK HERE FOR TICKET INFORMATION

"Fans of more traditionally-structured theater may not be thrilled by the informality and edginess of this dark farce, but I really enjoyed it." – David De Young, www.HowWasTheShow.com

Rude Mechs is crazy proud to host the work of Minneapolis-based theatre company Lamb Lays with Lion with their original performance, Tenebrism.

Tenebrism is the first experiment in the Theatre of Disruption. Performed in an intentionally fragile atmosphere, Lamb Lays with Lion blurs the line of performance and reality by sharing its failure with the audience.

Tenebrism is inspired by the religious imagery of Renaissance painter Caravaggio, Martin Scorsese’s "The Last Temptation of Christ," and legendary rock star Ian Curtis and his iconic post-punk band, Joy Division. The host, Jeremey, promises the audience a show about Jesus, Joy Division, and Caravaggio. However, as Tenebrism unfolds, it becomes clear that the real performance is in witnessing just how hard it is for Jeremey and his assistant, Jayne, to get the show to “go on” at all.

Tenebrism is the result of Lamb Lays with Lion’s “Theatre of Disruption” approach to creating ensemble performance.

Tenebrism is performed by Lamb Lays with Lion founding-members, Jeremey Catterton and Jayne Deis.

Tenebrism promises to be an unforgettable evening of entertainment.

ABOUT LAMB LAYS WITH LION Lamb Lays with Lion is an original and experimental theater company. We dedicate ourselves to the maintained integrity of performance, the exploration of unique and radical new forms, the discovery of virtual and spectral expressions, and most importantly, we strive toward being a leading force behind the thrust into a new age of art. For more information about this production or the company, please visit http://lamblayswithlion.org/. Lamb Lays with Lion company includes: Cameron Brainard, Jeremey Catterton, Jayne Deis, Julia Mae Fairbanks, Jake Lindgren, Katie Rose McLaughlin, Melissa Ann Murphy, Jacob Mullis, Dan O’Neil, Ashley Smith and Carl Atiya Swanson.