About this performance

The Method Gun

The Method Gun explores the life and techniques of Stella Burden, the actor-training guru of the 60s and 70s and creator of "The Approach" (referred to as "the most dangerous acting technique in the world"), which fused Western acting methods with risk-based rituals to infuse even the smallest role with sex, death, and violence. Using found text from the journals and performance reports of Burden's company, The Method Gun reenacts the final months of her company's rehearsals for their nine-years-in-the-making production of A Streetcar Named Desire. The Method Gun addresses the ecstasy and excesses of performing, the dangers of public intimacy, and the incompatibility of truth on stage and sanity in real life.

Since 1995, Rude Mechs has created a mercurial slate of 23 theatrical productions that represent a genre-defying cocktail of big ideas, cheap laughs, and dizzying spectacle. What these works hold in common is the use of play to make performance, the use of theaters as meeting places for audiences and artists, and the use of humor as a tool for intellectual investigation. The company tours these performances nationally and abroad; maintains The Off Center, a performance venue in Austin for arts groups of every discipline; and operates a year-round arts mentoring program for teenage girls.

COMPANY NOTE
When director and acting coach Stella Burden left the US in 1972, her company continued her nine - year rehearsal process, using training techniques from Burden's Approach, as well as others adapted from text books, other gurus, and—at one point—a high school film strip entitled What Makes an Actor, all of which have been incorporated into the contemporary understanding of The Approach. The text reproduced here comes from the research Rude Mechs unearthed in their investigation into the company's training.

Filmed at Imago Theater
Presented by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art