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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > April > 14
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Review: ‘The Method Gun’
The Rude Mechs can’t help themselves. They have to tweak whatever they do every time they do it.
And with ‘The Method Gun’ — the theater collective’s much-heralded play from last season — the tweaks, and the Rudes, are alright.
Better than alright actually. To this critic, ‘The Method Gun’ still ranks as one of the best productions to grace the Austin theater scene in the past few years.
I said as much last year when I reviewed the show’s premiere, one of the many productions that helped open up the Long Center for the Performing Arts.
But now the Rudes are back home at the Off-Center, their East Austin warehouse performance space. And now ‘The Method Gun’ packs more intensity and more poignancy. In the Long Center’s Rollins Studio Theater, the show featured plenty of visual — and theatrical — volume.In the much more intimate Off-Center, there’s no escaping the emotionally raw yet ultimately endearing ride. And the Rudes’ tweaks have made it all much more immediate and personal.
Of course, the sweet absurdity is still there. What’s not absurd about a group of actors still following an illusory acting guru named Stella Burden long after she has disappeared. So fixated with Burden’s acting technique — the method known as ‘The Method Gun’ — this group can’t let their guru go. Burden’s biggest challenge to her troupe? Present a production of Tennessee Williams’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ performed without any of the principal characters.
Isn’t that an impossibility?
But, oh, does the troupe — superbly acted by Thomas Graves, Heather Hannah, Jude Hickey, Hannah Kenah and Lana Lesley — try hard to make it work. They put themselves through humiliating exercises, frustrate themselves with acting challenges and otherwise unravel their emotions. They fight each other, they kiss each other, they scream at one another. They fumble with out-dated audio-visual equipment, plunk out tunes on a piano and consult a miniature tiger figurine that Stella Burden held dear.
Played in a series of quick-fire almost hallucinatory scenes that ricochet around in time, the play (the script was written by Kirk Lynn) seemingly in brilliant manner builds and unravels at the same time.
And the final scene — Stella Burden’s principal-less ‘Streetcar’ — emerges as one of the most polished, gorgeous, breathtaking and riveting moments on an Austin stage.
The Rudes Mechs plan to take ‘The Method Gun’ to New York’s P.S. 122 next year. Let’s hope the folks realize what we already know: The Rudes craft compelling theater.
‘The Method Gun’ continues 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday through May 2 at the Off Center, 2211 Hidalgo St. See www.rudemechs.com for ticket information.
Photo by Bret Brookshire.
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Tony Award-winning ‘Avenue Q’ comes to Austin
Guest blogger and American-Statesman staff Geoff West catches up with John Marx, co-creator of the Tony Award-winning puppet musical ‘Avenue Q.’ You read that right: a puppet musical.
The Muppets have Manhattan. Now “Avenue Q,” the Tony Award-winning Broadway parody inspired by the popular ‘70s TV show “Sesame Street,” brings an adult-themed satire to Bass Concert Hall. The show opens Wednesday and runs through Sunday.
Just like “Sesame Street,” colorful, outspoken puppets and their human pals join up on a fictitious street in New York City — this time called “Avenue Q.”
And though songs and music are delivered in a “familiar sing-song, rubber-ducky kind of way,” the lyrics don’t hit reading, writing and arithmetic, says co-creator Jeff Marx.
“It sort of has the flavor of the ‘Sesame Street’ teaching songs in the vocabulary of a children’s television show but it’s teaching adult themes,” Marx says.
Now, the lovable puppets are stumbling through an awkward post-college transition into real-life, dealing with topics that range from coming out of the closet to porn addictions.
Marx calls the play an “equal-opportunity parody,” as the show pokes fun at nearly every demographic. Most people get the joke; critics love it and the show’s a worldwide hit — now boosting a touring company in the U.S., a Broadway residence and a London offspring. A movie is in the works, too, he says.
“Puppets sort of have license to say blunt things that would be kind of offensive if humans were saying them,” says Marx, a law grad, who co-wrote the musical with Robert Lopez after the two men bonded in a songwriter’s workshop. “Honestly, the only people that have ever really written us letters (of disapproval) are Republicans (upset about a George Bush cameo in the lyrics of one song),” he says.
But the show’s a unanimous hit otherwise — even with the Hensons, the family of the late Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets. Leading up to the show’s humble opening at a small non-profit theatre in New York City in the Spring 2003, Marx and Lopez invited Jim Henson’s widow, daughter (and lawyer) to a reading. The writers feared a lawsuit. But to their surprise, she liked it. And Jim would too, she said. Soon after, The New York Times called it a “breakthrough musical” and four months later, “Avenue Q” was on center stage—now the 23rd longest-running show on Broadway, according to statistics compiled by the Internet Broadway Database.
We never expected that,” Marx says. “Here we are six years later going from kids living in Astoria (New York) to having Tony awards on our shelves.” He says they based the characters on themselves and friends—those from Ivy League schools who expected to “live in a high-rise in Manhattan and have a great job as the vice president of some company” after graduation only to end up Xeroxing and answering phones.
“When we grew up and entered the real world, we realized we missed having those friendly puppets,” says Marx. “The ones who could teach us how to do laundry. How to get out of jury duty.
Through a biting satire, the show teaches hope and optimism, summarized in the show’s last song, “Everything in Life is Only for Now”. Everything passes and everything changes, so hang in there, the cast sings. It’s a happy-ending and a hopeful message. And not unlike “Sesame Street.”
‘Avenue Q’ will be at 8 p.m. Wednesday, 2 and 8 p.m. Thursday and Saturday, 8 p.m. Friday, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday. Bass Concert Hall, 2300 Robert Dedman Drive. $19.50-$68.50. 477-6060, www.utpac.org.
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Explore Austin’s other live music scene
We’re in the midst of a five-week project exploring Austin’s ‘other’ live music scene — classical music. Recent coverage: | UT scholars fill in where Ellington left off on his only opera, ‘Queenie Pie ’ | Thomas Burritt bangs a new path with mallets and Tweets | New Music Co-op explores sound
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