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At Wesleyan University, a Theater Department production of The Rude Mechs’ "The Method Gun" takes devised theater digital.
With six
weeks of rehearsal in the balance, in March an ensemble of actors and
production team members at Wesleyan University took a break from moving out of
their dorm rooms to discuss the future of their show amid a rapidly developing
pandemic.
“We were at
that prime moment in rehearsal where we were tipping over into the show
blooming around us,” said director Katie Pearl. “We were so invested in it.”
Ten student
actors, led by Pearl, an Assistant Professor of Theater, began rehearsals in
January as part of a theatrical experiment: could The Method Gun, an inventive and challenging piece of devised
theater, have a second life? The play, created by Kirk Lynn and the Rude Mechs,
an Austin-based theater collective, had never been performed by another theater
company. In the face of a global health crisis, without an on-the-fly pivot,
all of the Wesleyan team’s work stood to be lost.
Devised
theater is a method of building plays from games, exercises, and rehearsal
improvisations, rather than starting from a written script. Because this work
is created collectively, devised pieces are often directly linked to the
performers who originated the work, making these shows more challenging to
revive than typical plays.
“All of these
incredible pieces just stop when the companies stop doing them,” said Pearl.
“So the question was: ‘What if, to a certain degree, we peeled the play back to
the original prompts and a new company devised around those prompts?’”
[The May 1 and 2 performances of The
Method Gun are available to view for free at the Wesleyan University Theater
Department’s YouTube channel.]
In the
original production, The Method Gun
followed the Rude Mechs’ investigation into the Stella Burden Company, a
(fictional) theater company with an intense commitment to Method acting. After
Burden abandoned her ensemble, the actors she left behind embarked on a
nine-year rehearsal process of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire without any of the main characters. The show
alternated between the Rude Mechs’ present-day presentations of their research
and re-enactments of Burden’s Company’s rehearsals, culminating in an epic
ten-minute performance of Streetcar while
swinging lights swooped across the stage.
Over nearly
100 hours of rehearsal, Pearl and her ensemble created a new vision of The Method Gun, reconceiving the Rude
Mechs’ characters as Wesleyan student actors and swapping the obstacle of bowling
balls rolling down a raked stage at the climax for the Mechs’ swinging lights.
The team’s plans, however, soon encountered a major hurdle. As the University headed into spring break, colleges nationwide began closing their doors in response to the coronavirus pandemic. On March 11, in the middle of break, Wesleyan President Michael Roth suspended in-person classes for the rest of the semester. So instead of coming back to resume classes, students returned to campus to move out of their dorm rooms. It was in the middle of those quickly shifting circumstances that TheMethod Gun team faced a day of reckoning for their show.
The meeting was emotional. Those present in the Theater Department lounge sat a socially-distanced six feet apart from one another, while others joined from their homes on Zoom. “I remember just wearing this hoodie and sinking into this hoodie and wanting not to be seen by anyone,” said actor Max Halperin, class of 2020. Before spring break, the actors would cuddle and lay on the floor together. Suddenly, “we couldn’t hug goodbye.”
“Artists are always expected to be exceptional in the worst of times,” said Esme Ng, class of 2022. “I said this to the group, ‘I’m really tired of that.’ We should be allowed to mourn and not have to jump back into this productive mindset.” For Ng, an Asian American actor from Staten Island, “one of the things that was always on my mind was the rise of hate crimes against Asian Americans. I broke down crying in front of my friends saying, ‘this is a really stressful time.’”
Many
options were on the table. In the eyes of Pearl and the Theater Department, the
students had rehearsed enough hours to conclude the project and receive full
course credit for their work. Public safety permitting, the team could return
to the show in the fall and invite the sole graduating senior in the cast back
as a guest artist. Or, they could experiment with presenting their work online.
Opinions
varied as to what to do. Actor Elijah Comas, class of 2022, was reluctant at
first to continue. “To me,” he said, “it felt like we were dragging the corpse
of this play through the mud.” On the other hand, Miguel Perez-Glassner, an
actor from the class of 2021, “was very desperate to keep going in any way.”
Walking
away would mean saying goodbye to hard work and a tight-knit community. Bringing
the production back in the fall could limit future students’ opportunities to
partake in a mainstage Theater Department production at Wesleyan. An online
version might turn into a pale imitation of what the team had worked so hard to
build.
Ultimately,
Pearl said, “Okay. We don’t know what it’s going to be and we’re not sure how
we feel about it. But I think what we need to do is come together and start by
reading through the play again. We have to see what the play is.” The team
adjourned for a week and agreed to explore bringing The Method Gun online.
For five weeks and eighty-plus-hours, they rehearsed and teched on Zoom, figuring out along the way how to unlock the artistic potential of a platform designed for conference calls in advance of livestreamed performances on May 1 and 2.
At first,
it was challenging to maintain focus online. “Rehearsing for three hours over
Zoom feels like a year,” said Halperin. Juggling time zones was also difficult:
members of the cast lived everywhere from Singapore and Macedonia to New
Hampshire.
But as
time went on, excitement for rehearsals grew. Spending time together meant the
team could stay connected to one another and had the space to process their
feelings. “Going to rehearsal became a way to sit in the sadness of what’s
happening but also continue to produce something exciting,” said stage manager
Betsy Zaubler, class of 2021. The challenge of making work on a digital
platform was invigorating. “Everybody is working from a blank slate,” said
actor Liz Woolford, class of 2021. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Yale MFA folks,
you have no idea how Zoom works as much as we have no idea how Zoom works. So
it’s a fascinating time to be trying to put up theater.”
Creating this piece within an educational context gave Pearl the permission to experiment and the drive to persevere. “As a director, this is making me realize more and more what a deep value it is to create a community of my actors and my ensemble,” she said. “Now it’s right up front. That is what I’m doing, and that matters to me. And the way I make community is by making something together.”
I think we were in the 1% of most engaged college students right now.
Max Halperin, class of 2020
For Halperin,
that commitment to community paid off. “I think we are in the 1% of most
engaged college students right now in this process because no one’s actually on
their phone and no one’s doing anything else. We’re all constantly engaged and
acting and working through it.”
When Pearl
first approached Lynn and the Rude Mechs to ask if they would let her revisit The Method Gun, she received permission
to adapt the play as she saw fit to her Wesleyan community. That carte blanche proved
essential to fit the play to Zoom. The ensemble rewrote the script
extensively, incorporating isolation as part of the Stella Burden Company’s
acting technique to make sense of why the show would be performed on Zoom. A
prologue was added to prepare audiences to experience the retooled show online.
A scene that originally involved the Stella Burden Company engaging in “Kissing
Practice” with one another was reimagined as a scene where isolated performers
kissed the nearest objects they had at hand.
Slowly, the process of making The Method Gun began to parallel the story of the company they were portraying. “In both situations there was this keystone that we took for granted. For them, it was Stella Burden,” said Perez-Glassner. “We took for granted that we were physically together in the same place, that we were going to perform on a stage together. When that goes away suddenly, and you don’t know what to do, you have to come together and figure out on the spot how to move forward.”
Even Kissing
Practice felt relevant to their new realities. “For the students in the cast,
one thing that’s very real for them is they can’t have sex with their people,”
said Pearl. “Kissing practice became a way for them to try to, in a
tongue-in-cheek way, feel sexuality and intimacy using objects in their room.”
One discovery
was crucial: by choosing the order in which actors entered into a Zoom meeting,
Pearl could control the actors’ positions on the screen. This allowed for
creative scene compositions, with key characters being placed at the center of
the screen or far away from the action, depending on what a scene called for.
In some scenes, actors “passed” objects from their box on Zoom to their
neighbors’ boxes, aided by duplicate props that had been shipped to the actors’
homes.
Many findings were exciting. For scene transitions, actors would exit the meeting while a title card filled the screen. Each actor was shipped a green screen that allowed for creative backgrounds at a few pivotal moments. Giving each performer a real plant added scenic cohesion between their individual Zoom frames. Adjusting camera angles allowed for dramatic point of view shots and clear differentiation between scenes of the cast members as themselves versus scenes portraying members of Burden’s company. PowerPoint and FaceTime added additional flavors to the show. Dramaturgs even built a website that delved into the history of the Stella Burden Company for interested audience members.
The cast had personalized lighting and scenic design meetings for their stages: childhood bedrooms, dining rooms, and living rooms that quickly grew littered with spike tape and prop tables. “I have banned all members of my family from my room so they don’t accidentally move things,” said Woolford.
“I have banned all members of my family from my room so they don’t accidentally move things.”
Liz Woolford, Class of 2021
Not all
technical experiments were successful. The actors were shipped sheets of gel
filters to adjust the color of their lighting, only to be foiled by an actor’s
color-correcting camera. During the final dress rehearsal, the stage manager
got kicked out of the conference call in which she called cues, pausing the
show. Late in the rehearsal process, the team realized that, on Zoom, every
user’s screen has a unique arrangement of speakers, potentially ruining weeks
of blocking. But the team soon discovered software called OBS to broadcast
Pearl’s screen and ensure that viewers saw what she saw. It also allowed for
the kind of color correction the team aimed for with gels.
After months
of preparation, it was finally showtime. In live chat next to the YouTube
broadcast, viewers said hello to friends from around the country and responded
enthusiastically to the performances. At one point during the closing
performance, Lynn, the original playwright, asked in the chat if the actors
were using real beer in violation of the performance agreement with the Rude
Mechs. (Answer from the Assistant Director: no—the set designer shipped custom
beer labels to the students to use on soda cans.)
Minor glitches occurred: occasionally, the internet slowed down; one performer’s computer broke midway through the first performance, and an assistant director, serving as a swing in case of internet lags, briefly stepped into his role.
The overall
experience, however, was thrillingly live. Actors livestreamed monologues and
played instruments, burned letters, danced erratically and dressed in
tiger costumes. In one particularly moving moment, the actors watched footage of
themselves rehearsing before the pandemic.
The Rude Mechs maintained a text thread during the show, “saying how much we were honored by the students and loved what they were doing,” Lynn said. “In some ways the greater the obstacle, the greater the beauty of it. Because they had to do it in a way that was so difficult, it might be the most beautiful production of Method Gun.”
Of course, there was still the question of what
the Streetcar performance would look like online.“Because a large part of
the audience knew how it ended, it was definitely building toward the final
production and, ‘how will they pull this off in this medium?’” Lynn said. While
reading stage directions against pitch-black backdrops, the actors performed a
haunting dream ballet that leaned on audience members’ imaginations, surreally
depicting Streetcar with images of flowers, puppets, and hands
suspended in space while also acknowledging the bowling balls the performers
had been forced to leave behind.
To close the show, just like in the original Method Gun,the ensemble engaged in a final Burden exercise: two minutes of
“Crying Practice,” while the names audience members submitted at the top of the
play of important mentors were projected on screen. The experiment completed, the
actors’ faces slowly turned to grins.
The team’s
pride in what they had accomplished was obvious. “Three weeks ago, if you told
me that the rest of the theater I was going to make was going to look more like
this than what I’d previously made, I’m not sure that I would still do it,”
said Comas. “Now I feel less sure.”
“I hope one day people write a play about us,” Perez-Glassner said.
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