Cherrywood squared

Nineteen years ago, an indie film that meandered its way through a Texas college town introduced a vital term to the youth-culture lexicon. Some of the same loopy vision and mellowly paranoid vibe in Richard Linklater’s Austin-set Slacker circulates through Cherrywood, a sui generis theater piece by Kirk Lynn, a founding member of Austin’s celebrated Rude Mechanicals collective.

Set at a house party, Cherrywood, previewing this week at Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co., features arguments over band names, occasional freak-outs about werewolves and quasi-philosophical ruminations along the lines of: “Every 30 minutes, no matter where I am, I imagine what was on TV last year at this exact time so I know if we’re making any progress.”

It also features a strikingly unusual structure: Cherrywood’s script consists of a set of lines with facing stage directions but lacking any character assignments. “It was a way for the ensemble to collaborate on the piece without writing text,” the 38-year-old playwright explains. When the Rude Mechanicals staged it, company members determined which lines belonged to their characters.

The resulting “massive GRE problem,” as Lynn describes the complex process of sorting out coherent sets of lines and actions, was daunting enough when the Rude Mechs debuted the work with ten performers in 2004. At Mary-Arrchie, David Cromer’s production will feature several dozen more. Says Lynn, who considered missing opening night given his wife’s pregnancy, “When David told me he was using 49 actors, I bought my plane ticket.”

Cromer, 45, who’s recently enjoyed high-profile successes (the New York transfer of Our Town) and setbacks (Broadway’s Brighton Beach Memoirs), seems sanguine about the massive challenge. “Even within the most rigidly written play, there are huge gaps you have to fill in,” the director says. “This does that times ten, which is really terrifying and really freeing.”

Sitting in a tiny office in Angel Island, Mary-Arrchie’s shambolic second-floor home base in East Lakeview, with cast members avidly sawing set materials nearby, Cromer describes his efforts to have his sizable cast interact meaningfully: “We’ve been working for the last two days on these two huge scenes in which almost everyone’s onstage, everyone’s sitting, and this huge number of people has to have a conversation without it disintegrating into madness or just these little groups talking. And that’s just been fascinating.”

It’s not just a stunt: In the director’s eyes, the energy and breakdowns involved in amassing this huge conversation have parallels on a national scale. “The dynamic of dealing with a giant group—that’s what’s complicated about being in a country this size,” he says. “That mob management, that idea of living within a mass of people is what this production is trying to make palpable.”

For Lynn, too, Cherrywood has a message larger and more elusive than its party setting might suggest. The San Antonio native says the play, initially focused on the utopian ideals of arty Austin circles, took on darker tones in revisions, bringing out the violent fervor that can attend such ideals.

An undercurrent of danger is often visible in the Rude Mechanicals’ work. The group is perhaps best known for its adaptation of Greil Marcus’s punk history Lipstick Traces. (A later unauthorized production at Burning Man ended with the performance space being set aflame.) A newer work, The Method Gun, depicts a production of A Streetcar Named Desire performed among wildly swinging pendulums. “People have gotten hurt,” Lynn tells us.

“Badly?” we ask.

“Yeah, pretty badly.”

Cromer, whose own spectacular, pendulum-free production of Tennessee Williams’s classic is a current hit at Writers’ Theatre, has his own concerns. “I’m very worried that the two plays are very similar,” he says. “People are going to go, ‘This is just like Streetcar! He’s only got one idea!’”

Cherrywood starts previews Tuesday 22.

• More Theater articles