The Method Gun at ArtsEmerson (Boston): Live review

Austin playwright Kirk Lynn's scored a couple of recent successes in Chicago: Pavement Group staged his Greil Marcus adaptation Lipstick Traces in 2008, and this summer Mary-Arrchie and David Cromer put on a memorably large production of his Cherrywood. Lynn’s company the Rude Mechanicals are on the road this year with a newer work, 2008’s The Method Gun; I caught up to it at ArtsEmerson's cozy black box theater in Boston on October 16. It goes on to dates in Columbus, New Haven and New York; no Chicago appearance is planned, but I’ll bet it’d find a warm reception here.

Read the review after the jump.

Like Cherrywood, The Method Gun portrays, almost anthropologically, an unusual collective; this time, though, it’s not bohemian Texans at a house party, but method actors. To be precise, the play presents itself as a re-enactment of the rehearsal process and opening for a singular ‘70s staging of A Streetcar Named Desire by an ensemble founded by legendary (and fictional) acting guru Stella Burden. With Burden decamped for South America, her group, occupying the unsteady territory between fanatical artists and full-fledged cult, carries on with her vision: producing Williams’s classic sans Stella, Stanley, Blanche or even Mitch.

Featuring such delicious, and weirdly resonant, sendups of the rehearsal process as “Crying Practice,” in which the piece’s five performers slowly wring out sobs, The Method Gun traces a loopy, relentlessly inventive trajectory en route to a Streetcar dominated by “Red hots!” and flores para los muertos. Company members bicker over the meaning of truth, a tiger emerges from left field to note, rightly enough, that Death of a Salesman would be improved by the addition of a tiger, and various Chekhov plays often seem on the verge of breaking out, resulting overall in something like a collaboration between Cassavetes and Tex Avery. Beneath its zany, passionate surfaces lie some fierce investigations into the nature of art.

This lovingly satirical exploration of ensemble dynamics is, of course, undertaken by a tightly knit ensemble, which only heightens the piece’s self-reflexive cast. The Rude Mechs’ eloquent teamwork becomes not just tangible but kinetic in the brilliantly orchestrated final moments of the piece, in which a set of swinging pendulums figure prominently. I was particularly taken with Thomas Graves’s wry performance as the intensely repressed Carl Reyholt (also Pablo, Paper Boy, Tamale Vendor and Doctor), but the group as a whole is the genuine star of the show. Stanislavski, I’m pretty sure, would approve.