The Rude Mechs’ The Method Gun and the Power of Belief

A man with a bushy beard and mustard-yellow shirt interrupts the play before me to ask the audience to reach into the envelope in front of them for a pencil and paper. Staring at my computer screen—my window to the world since the start of the pandemic—I hesitate for a moment. Should I grab a pencil too? I have a post-it on my right, will that do? The man then tells the audience—his actual audience—to close their eyes and think of the name of someone who taught them something. Before I can question how present I should be, can be, for a pre-recorded performance, I have a name in mind. 

The Rude Mechs’ The Method Gun professes to explore “the life and techniques of Stella Burden,” the supposed developer of the theatrical training technique, “the Approach.” We learn early in the show that Burden abruptly quit teaching and moved to South America, leaving behind her company. The play is meant to honor Stella’s life and work, interspersing demonstrations of her techniques with reimaginings of the remaining company’s rehearsals and scenes from their 1976 production of A Streetcar Named Desire—a final performance nine years in the making, in which the actors play everyone and everything except the four main characters (Mitch, Stanley, Blanche, and Stella). If it isn't clear yet, Stella Burden is not a real historical figure, and this company and their 1976 production never existed. Rather than reimagining history, then, The Method Gun enacts a kind of mocu-docudrama: a dramatic, sometimes farcical story of theatrical practice and instruction. One would be forgiven, however, for not realizing this, and indeed, much of the enjoyment of the play for me came from forgetting—where I was, the state of the world around me, the fact that productions like the one I was watching have been cancelled all across the world.

The actors, speaking sometimes as themselves and sometimes as their characters, consistently toed the line between sarcastic mockery and earnest reflection as they revealed an inherent driving force of acting and theater—the desire to find the key to one’s identity outside of oneself. In the case of the Stella Burden company, this desire became located within the absent figure of their guru. As one of the actors articulates, “I’m not even a kind of person yet. I need you, Stella, to make me . . . I’m asking the question, how does one become oneself? That's what I’m hoping you can do for me.” The deep love and loss that surrounds the company’s conception of Burden, in turn highlights one of the powers of theater as a practice: belief. As articulated in the song “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” which became a kind of instrumental refrain for the show, “it wouldn’t be make-believe if you believed in me.” In this way, the play asks us, what is truth, self, theater, but a practice of belief?

Throughout the show I teetered on the edge of full immersion but being separated from so much—my friends, family, teachers—has taught me a lot about the limits and power of belief. There’s much lost in a pre-recorded performance but also much gained in terms of access, collaboration, and connection if you leave yourself open to the experience. The actors in The Method Gun lost their guru, and perhaps their wits, but the final performance of their Streetcar was a thing of unspeakable beauty. And when the scraps of paper collected from the audience went up in flames at the end, I didn’t feel as disconnected as before.