Review: ‘The Method Gun’

Should I begin this review with a question? Answer: Rubik’s Cube. Or any puzzle of sufficient complexity. Life itself will do, as an example. How do I become myself? Everything we’ve done is nothing. I have no idea how to act as myself-when to cry, who to kiss, eye contact. If I could make myself understood to you. Forget it–let’s do something else.

Given that so much of our inner lives and the outer vastness of life in general–can feel like a Rubik’s Cube that’s always just a few too many moves away from being solved. Given that the creative arts, at their best, provide not only a welcome distraction from the grave toward which we all plummet but may also evoke the feeling that, oh, here’s one of those moves that helps solve the Cube, that makes just a bit more sense of my life, of the larger world and it’s confounding patterns of chaos. Given that, is it any wonder that some artists eventually deconstruct their art, those smaller cubes designed to reiterate relevant sections of that largest puzzle, in an attempt to discern the most effective parts.

But sometimes, the move you thought would be a potentially Cube-solving turning point turns out to only make things worse. Thus, rehearsals. Thus first, second and third–drafts. Whatever it takes to find your way in the forest of the night.

Featuring a cast of five from the Rude Mechs’ ensemble, The Method Gun explores the nine years spent by (the fictional) Stella Burden’s 1970s theatre company as they prepared their production of A Streetcar Named Desire for its debut, in the wake of Burden’s unannounced departure for South America.

Framed in such a way that each cast member portrays at least three characters—the actor himself (or herself), a member of Burden’s company, and that person’s character from Streetcar—the play veers off into any number of directions and time periods. Freed from the constraints of a linear narrative, The Method Gun explores two key issues: why some people who don’t have a passion for creation choose to define themselves as artists; and how a charismatic mentor can fool a willing student into chasing approval long after they should have moved on.

It’s the exploration of these themes that makes The Method Gun such a potent piece of work. Burden’s ideas, as they’re depicted by the company she left behind, are absurd and hilarious, a dead-on parody of 70s-era radical theatre (an example of the deft satire at work: the company’s production of Streetcar is done without the characters of Stanley, Blanche, Stella, or Mitch).

They’re also arbitrary in a way that a young artist could easily mistake for wisdom. Characters explain that the audition process for the company consisted of Burden simply asking the question, “Truth or beauty?” and often making a decision before the answer was even given. She leaves notes explaining her theories locked in a box, with the instructions to set the note ablaze before reading, and then trying to read as many words as possible before it’s consumed by flames. What’s more, the play opens with something called “crying practice,” in which the five actors carry out one of Burden’s rehearsal rituals by standing in front of the audience, wordlessly attempting to bring themselves to tears.

The re-creation of the Streetcar re-creation is fascinating, if you’ve ever been involved with or enchanted by theatre, especially artists, more so if you’ve also watched yourself being yourself on the less defined stages of life and been unsure of your performance there.

There is certainly a danger in Method Gun. That there are too many layers, too much thespian navel-gazing going on, too intense cerebral machination needed to appreciate this whole….

Never mind the Rubik’s Cube. Think, instead, about your favorite caper film. The Italian Job. Ocean’s Eleven. There’s a goal to be reached, much fine loot to be gained, if only you can suss the system and time the diversions and jimmy the locks and make it through those crisscrossed laser beams–that lattice of amplified light, the breaking of which will trip the alarm, and that’s it, hero, so close to heaven, and now you’re hella fucked.

They’re looking directly at theatre through theatre, at what it has to offer the people who perform it and the people who watch those performers. The difficulty is in reaching the goal, in making the looking as entertaining as what they’re looking at, making what they’re looking at as entertaining as ittheatre can be, making it all come together in front of an audience that wants to be entertained but would also appreciate the feeling that, oh, here’s one of those moves that help solve the Cube. (Okay, the cube is back.)

I’ll give you a hint: They suss the system and time the diversions and jimmy the locks. The actors do it every night they perform the Method Gun and that, during the final minutes of the show, they do the whole thing over again–this time between swinging pendulums of light, the laser-caged caper finale gone Newtonian old school.

But the power of The Method Gun isn’t restricted to an “inside baseball” satire of thirty-year-old acting tropes. The concept of directionless journeymen artists, forever trying to live up to a creative ideal they’re not sure ever really existed, is one that extends well beyond the theatre, and watching these people struggle with that live and in person is what makes the play such a powerful piece of work. The Method Gun could have just as easily been about folk musicians chasing the ghost of a Dylan stand-in, or filmmakers trying to re-create the approach of a Kubrick analogue, but it’s a theatrical piece, and the Rude Mechs set it in the world it inhabits. In the end, The Method Gun succeeds, first at exploring the universal themes that artists of every stripe struggle with, and also in reaffirming the medium’s place in the larger artistic world.

The show is a fake; the acting’s pretense; the danger is real; it’s impressive as hell. But even without the lights framing symmetry in perfectly timed arcs and the Rudes stepping or bending or fighting or dancing expertly between them, the best danger of theatre was already there: the danger that something real will emerge from this stage of fakery and pretense, and it may have teeth.