The Method Gun will join more than 400 plays that have been pro-
duced over the past 34 years as part of Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana
Festival of New American Plays. At the beginning of the project that was to become
The Method Gun, director Shawn Sides, playwright Kirk Lynn, their four co-producing
artistic directors and other members of the Rude Mechs left their digs in downtown
Austin to retrace the footsteps of their meta-fictional guru Stella Burden. They
used one of Burden’s favorite techniques in determining the route: hanging up
a world map in the warehouse they call home and each in turn shooting it with
a revolver. Theatre does have its risks. Having gathered the “chartgets” together,
the group reviewed its finances and chose Quito, Ecuador, as the place to begin
their journey. The Rude Mechs were trying, in part, to more fully comprehend
Burden’s quixotic acting techniques known collectively as “The Approach.” I
explored with Shawn Sides and Kirk Lynn the process employed to create this unique
work, as well as some insights into the nature of mentors, teachers and gurus.
KL: Rude Mechs is a theatre collective. There are six
co-producing artistic directors right now and we’ve been making plays
together for about thirteen years. Our newest artistic director, Thomas
Graves, who came on about two years ago, is actually from Louisville.
SD: Your company is on the road quite a bit. Do you have
a permanent home?
SS: We have a “theatre.” I put it in quotes,
but we love it. It’s called the Off Center and we’ve been there
since 1999. It used to be a feed store, so it’s a big, old, funky
warehouse on East Seventh Street in Austin.
SD: How did you settle on the collective format for your
operation?
KL: I believe we became a collective because everybody
is a Type A personality and wants to be a leader – which only really
works well if everybody can be in charge. This is a way to let everyone
always sort of be in charge..
SD: You’ve been together thirteen years, so it must
be working.
KL: It has worked out great, actually.
SD:That must make it difficult to establish a distinct
viewpoint for the group. Do you all belong to a particular school?
KL: Not really, other than ourselves, I suppose. One of
our desires is to create a really dense performance experience with a lot
of points of view, but we very much value the discipline that allows us
to speak with a single voice. We hope that while it has depth, it also
maintains focus. The great benefit of the collective format is that we
feel we get the benefit of everyone else’s experience. Shawn Sides
trained with Ann Bogart and Richard Checker while going to NYU. Having
her in a leadership role lets us all benefit from that experience. Madge
Darlington and Thomas Graves have M.F.A.s in technical theatre, which is
part of our singular voice.
SD: What is your background?
KL: I studied writing with the Mitchner Center. So, collectively,
we have an artistic director with four graduate degrees and sixty years
of theatre experience. At least, that’s our theory.
SD: Are you one of the founding members?
KL: Yes. All the artistic directors, with the exception
of Thomas, are Texans. Most of us met in Austin because the University
of Texas has a pretty rich performance scene.
SD: Shawn, how did you come to study with Anne Bogart?
SS: I was in the Gallatin program at NYU. I think of it
as a “salad bar” program where you can put together your own
degree. There were people putting together a law degree and acting, for
obvious reasons. Others were putting together medicine with education.
The program allows you to create a niche and develop some level of expertise
by the time you graduate. I was able to take Siti Company workshops and
a class with Anne Bogart for NYU credit.
SD: Ann Bogart has directed plays at the Humana Fesitval.
It will be interesting to see how that influence is transmuted and brought
to the stage through you. Would you consider her a guru?
SS: That’s a good question…she never sets
herself up as a guru. Usually, I think of a guru as someone teaching “The
Way” and you then dedicate yourself to that way – the only
way. Anne Bogart would never do that; she’s much more accessible
as a human being than a guru might be. So I would say, “No, she isn’t
a guru,” but I would absolutely consider her to be one of the most
important teachers in my life.
SD: Do remember the moment of unification?
KL: I think I had a script called Pale Idiots I was trying
to produce, and we decided that we would make a play together.
SD: How did The Method Gun, selected for this spring’s
Humana Festival, evolve?
KL: I am a writer as well as a member of the collective
and I became interested in how actors expose themselves – by which,
I mean they take great emotional risks and do these amazing things. I was
interested in the lengths they go to in the process of sharing their experience
and emotion. From that, it occurred to me to create a set of exercises
that would be extremely risky. .
SD: Once you had the idea, what was the process?
KL: The title was one of the first things that came to
me. I brought in about two pages of text and everybody started to bring
in ideas and images they wanted to adapt, and it caught on. From there,
we started to develop the scenario that would allow this original seed
idea of mine to grow. It started with the actors sitting around doing really
intense things to generate the experience they wanted to share.
SD: Give me a “for instance.” What kind of
exercises did they go through?
KL: In the final production of The Method Gun, the one
Louisville audiences will see, they will practice crying. They stand in
front of the audience and make themselves cry – which is both moving
and very funny. They also do a kissing practice that is more funny than
moving. At the end, there’s a beautiful recreation of A Streetcar
Named Desire with no text that is performed in and around these giant swinging
pendulums. The pendulums are made of steel and they are very real. It’s
very truly dangerous and very truly beautiful. All the things they do during
the play are leading up to this performance. It’s like an Indiana
Jones thing.
SD: In The Method Gun, you perform Tennessee Williams’ A
Streetcar Named Desire without Stella or Stanley…
KL:Or Blanche or Mitch. One of our theories was that this
woman, Stella Burden, wanted to promote the minor roles because most actors – and
most people – spend their lives performing minor roles or doing smaller
things. But take any production, Taming of the Shrew, for instance – the
actor playing Grumio is just as intense and has spent just as much of his
life in the theatre but has a much smaller role than the actor playing
Petruchio. This was a way for us to sing the praises of the small characters.
When you’re dealing
with a great work of literature that the audience already knows most of
the story, to lift up these minor characters is revealing in many ways.
SD: What are the essential components of Burden’s
philosophy of “The Approach”?
KL: This is in the greater mythology, so you won’t
see all of this on stage. “The Approach” is a suite of acting
exercises created by Burden. They are a combination of risk-based techniques
that are derived from rituals such as the Naghol or land diving of the
Vanuatu people mixed with the attempt to portray an emotional truth – like “The
Method” popular-
ized by The Group in 1930s and later taught by Lee Strasberg at the Actors
Studio.
SD: Are there other physical risks for the actors?
KL: A sub-plot in the play is that Burden always kept
a loaded gun in the theatre to remind everybody what they were risking
and what was at stake. We created this myth that either two actors in doing
The Method Gun exercise had shot one another, or maybe she shot one of
them, at which point she fled the country.
SD: So The Method Gun is a literal firearm.
KL: Yes. There is the Chekovian loaded gun on stage. It’s
kept in a bird cage at the back of the stage throughout the play.
SD: Along with other props – like the tiger?
KL: I can’t remember how he got there but, yes,
the tiger is an important feature of our play.
SD: How does the collaboration between playwright and
director manifest itself? From your description, the traditional boundaries
would seem not to apply.
KL: It seems to me that there are very few boundaries
between Shawn and me, or between us and other members of the company. The
whole company is very committed to each other, and we have been able to
get through any sort of tension and difficulty so far. But there are weird
moments – that’s
why discipline is so very important, because there are at least six artistic
directors having ideas. With a lot of ideas flying around at any moment,
we try to pack them all into a single slim narrative that tells an effective
story.
SS:We have been doing this so long I don’t even
know where the boundaries are or where they might be for other companies.
It often has to do with whose original idea it was. This one was originally
Kirk’s idea, so I butt in a little bit less than I usually would.
We did a show about Niccolo Tesla that was originally my idea. I brought
it up in a meeting one day and we all worked on it, but I was probably
a little more pushy about what I wanted to see on stage.
SD: Does that push you?
KL:I think there is a lot of pressure on the playwright
and the director to make everything come together. The swinging pendulums,
in fact, were created by an actor at the Orchard Project and then we had
to find a way to make it fit. Going back to the tiger, I don’t know
how it came to be in the play; but suddenly I’m writing monologues
and it becomes an element that must be integrated. It’s an interesting
task for a writer.
SD:The whole process strikes me as somewhat Brechtian.
KL: I think we are often quite Brechtian, but in this
work we wanted to get very emotional and talk very directly about emotion,
so there was a new pressure on the play outside of the collective creation.
We want to genuinely move people and have them cry and gasp. It seems easier
for us to be intellectual and create these different puzzles and games
that might occur during a performance. But it was a new challenge to follow
the depth of emotion we felt without losing the sense of fun, games and
intellectual challenges that are expected from our work. I hope it has
an earnest and sincere dimension because, after all, the play is about
our own experiences in many ways. We ask questions like, “What does
it mean to commit to one another?” and “What
does it mean to continue doing something that’s largely a fruitless
exercise?” Somewhere there is an actor developing an ulcer over the
role of Grumio. Why do they do it?
SD: The Humana Festival audience will be filled with actors,
directors, designers…people from the theatre world. What do you
hope people who have never taken an acting class will take away?
SS:Death of a Salesman is about a salesman, but I don’t
think you need that direct experence to get it. There are a lot of plays
about theatre because we’re
writing about what we know. We hope that we are able to transcend the particular
vocation of the characters and speak to anyone who has found themselves
in a workshop that was confusing or has been working with a particular
technique that has become rote. Anyone who has tried to function as a team
member – in whatever context – will appreciate the political
infighting that drives the action of the play.
KL: I think everyone has been in the world of The
Method Gun. At its core, the play looks at what it means to have a
guru for good or ill. Everybody has those people in their past who have
taught them a great deal, sometimes with a lot of abusive power. At the
very beginning of the play, we ask everybody to write down the name of
the greatest teacher in their life. At the end of the play we honor those
names and it’s a way to make that connection. Everyone has had this
experience. My father is a barber, but he had a relationship like this
with the person who taught him to cut hair. The dynamic between mentor
and mentored is singular, and that’s what we’re bringing to
the stage.
SD: Are you excited to be part of the Humana Festival?
SD: Are you kidding!?! This is an incredible validation
of thirteen years of work. We’ve always been at the Humana Festival,
but to be chosen to be onstage? It’s fantastic
The 34th annual Humana Festival of New Amercan Plays will include seven
full-length plays and three ten-minute plays presented in rotating repertory
at Actors Theatre between February 21 and March 28. In addition to the
theatre’s three venues, a site-specific work, Heist!, will
be performed March 12-28 by the Actors Theatre Acting Apprentice Company
at 21c Hotel Museum. For tickets and more information, go to www.actorstheatre.org.,
or call the box office at 502.584.1205.