BLAST: This sounds like a ton of interesting material. But is there a way you can say, without giving too much away, what people should actually expect when they’re in their seats?
LL: The feeling of the show is that you’re in the room with Rude Mechs, our company, and we are taking you through this other company’s life in the rehearsal room, and what we believe they experienced while working on their show. You’ll see moments when we’re doing reenactments from their world and moments where we’re talking to you directly about our experience of working on their work.
SS: And actual rehearsals of their version of “Streetcar.” And the exercises. Several of them, not all of them.
BLAST: You’re both founding members of the Rude Mechanicals. Where did the name come from, and what’s your mission as a company?
LL: Rude Mechanicals is the long version of our name; we mostly go by Rude Mechs now. It’s from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Seven of us started the company about 15 years ago. We all came out of an English program at the University of Texas, Shakespeare at Winedale. We had a lot of Shakespeare under our belts, so we were drawn to the idea of people who have day jobs and get together at night to try to make art. Since then, we’ve learned that there are about 8000 other theater companies in the country that have the same name, so we go by Rude Mechs.
SS: And also a rock band in New Zealand.
LL: They’re actually, like, famous. They have an album called Pitch Black. But we started the company as a collective, because that was how we learned how to make theater in a really satisfying way out of that program, and wanted to be able to do whatever we wanted in the beginning, from acting to directing to designing sets to whatever. We operate as a collective by consensus decision-making. We have to agree on everything. There are now six co-producing artistic directors that run the company and another 22 company members, so we’re a big group based in Austin, Texas, that makes new plays. We run a theater space down there, present the work of other people as well as our own, and support the community of artists who live in Austin by sharing our space with them. That’s what we’re about.
BLAST: I’ve read lots of great things online about your company. I’ve never been to Texas, but everyone tells me that Austin is a fantastic place for the arts.
SS: It is a great place for the arts. And if you have to live in Texas . . .
LL: It’s the place to live in Texas.
BLAST: Not Canton?
LL: Oh, you’re going to get letters . . .
SS: Canton does have the world’s largest flea market.
BLAST: That’s pretty cool.
SS: I don’t know about cool, but it’s unique!
BLAST: You were talking about how sometimes you share your own experiences with acting method. It must have been kind of a strange play to work on when, as you were saying, you’ve been acting for so long. Did it give you any new insights, or change the way you think about producing theater?
SS: The inspiration for making the play was these experimental artists . . . are the shoulders on which we stand. They’re the people who led the way for the kind of theater that we make. The fact that we talk straight to the audience as ourselves in the room—that’s a thing that’s been around for a while. It’s not traditional, but there’s a whole canon of work—and I don’t just mean breaking the fourth wall and direct audience address—in which the actors are not just characters in the fiction . . . but the actors onstage are present as themselves in the room, everyone’s just hanging out in the room together, I’m Shawn, this is Lana, hello audience, now I’m going to do a scene, now it’s over . . . it’s not exactly like that! But the exercises were not exotic to us. So I don’t think learning about them changed the way we make theater, but the fact that they exist inspired us to make this piece.
LL: I would also say that we’ve been together for a very long time, and one thing that we get asked when we travel with a show is how we make new plays; what’s our process for making new plays; and then we get asked to teach that process when we’re on the road. That’s one of the things we looked at really hard when we were making “The Method Gun,” because we don’t have a single process for making a new play. We approach every single play differently, and how it gets made is very different every time. The thing that is the same is the people who are in the room together, but how we go at it can be anything, it can start anywhere. Studying the approach, Stella Burden’s approach, and how that company went about making their play freed us up a lot. We felt a panic a few years ago about not having a singular process and not having something we can go teach, something codified. I think that we relaxed about that after making this play, because what we do works for us, because we’re us. You couldn’t put us onto another company and say, make plays like that—it just wouldn’t work.
BLAST: How has “The Method Gun” been received by audiences in its travels? Have you had any particularly memorable reactions?
SS: I think the Rude Mechs is sort of a gateway to experimental theater . . . not in all Rude Mechs plays. Some are straight up plays; some are kooky-experimental and you can’t figure out what’s going on. At the Humana Festival, there was a 90-year-old woman who used a walker. She gave us a standing ovation and raised her walker up in the air. We were like, yes! We can quit now!
LL: I think the audiences who come to see our shows are already inclined toward experimental theater—it’s such a stupid name for what anybody does, all theater is experimental—but our audience is more artistically prepared for the kind of work we make. So in general, if you come to see one of our shows, you already know what you’re getting into. We rarely have bad reactions, unless somebody just accidentally showed up and got pissed off. The Humana Festival, actually, had the broadest spectrum.
SS: Yes, there was the 90-year-old with her walker, and then there was Larry on the aisle. Larry did not like the show because it was too experimental.
LL: He didn’t like it so much that he wrote a letter to American Theater Magazine!
SS: They published it! He likes play-type plays, that you walk into, and there’s a story, with characters, and there’s an exposition, and a rising action, and a climax—
LL: And he wants to know what he’s seeing will end up in the canon one day. That was his big problem with people who make plays like us.
SS: And those plays are great . . .
LL: But they’ll never be in the canon, and nobody’s going to see them in 50 years because they’re not important enough right now. So we have that, but we don’t have many too many on-the-aisle Larrys . . . except one in Austin.
BLAST: it sounds like what you’re doing is just sort of in the moment. And I don’t want to say that everything the Rude Mechs do is really personal, but you have such a deep connection with the people you’re working with, it seems like, yeah, maybe it won’t be in the canon, but maybe that’s not what it’s for. It’s more about the performance and the time that you’re doing it in, and the people you’re doing it with.
LL: Well, I’m totally convinced it’ll be in the canon.
“The Method Gun” will be performed at the Paramount Black Box, 559 Washington Street, in Boston’s Theatre District, Oct. 13 – 17, 2010. See the ArtsEmerson website for detailed show times and ticket prices.
To hear the laughter and Texas accents in this interview, as well as music and relevant literary pieces read aloud, tune into the online radio show High Volumes on October 18 on cyberstationusa.com.
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