"The Method Gun' at the Fringe Festival

The Method Gun, Kirk Lynn's multi-layered piece about the fabled acting coach Stella Burden, begins with one actor complaining that no one notices how little he talks even though he's "not talking" all the time. Later, another actor sets an egg-timer for crying practice, asks non-starter questions such as "How does one become one's self?" and commands others to "start rehearsing harder." Still later, men prance about naked with balloons tied to their genitalia.

You could be forgiven for walking out at such antics. But you would have missed a profound triumph of the power of art and theater.

Loaded gun at rehearsals

Where Stanislavski method acting revolutionized theater, Stella Burden's application maimed it. Her process attempted to create moments of truth and beauty infused at all times with risk and danger. She kept a loaded gun freely available at all rehearsals, to remind the actors that they can kill each other.

But her method revealed the profundity that often lies behind madness. Burden auditioned actors by asking a single question: "What would you rather have, beauty or truth?" She also taught them that "Rehearsal is not a way of getting to something; it's a way of deserving what you get."

If Jesus had nine years

Burden's Streetcar Named Desire project drew five young actors together in the late 1960s to spend nine years rehearsing the Tennessee Williams play without the central roles of Blanche, Stella, Stanley or Mitch.

Only a few years into her nine-year process, Burden abandoned her troupe, fleeing to South America and never contacting anyone again. In her absence, the five members persevered much like the disciples of Jesus after the Crucifixion. On stage, they began to appear like a cult, sharing rituals, seminal texts, even interpreting relics and speaking in parables.

Think of it: Nine of their most productive, capable, impressionable years committed to finding the truth in the bit roles of one of America's greatest plays.

Anyone should feel lucky to seem so frivolous to others. Anyone should feel lucky to know for even one day the depth and intensity of passion that drove these actors to expend their youth chasing an ideal. No doubt Jesus, given nine years with his disciples, would have wrecked them as thoroughly as Burden did.

Ayn Rand's worshipper

The Rude Mechanicals, a troupe based in Austin, Texas, interviewed these Burden company members, and from these interviews as well as the company's own research they constructed the three levels of The Method Gun. The Rude Mech's step to the fore of the stage to narrate the work as it unfolds, detailing their research, the interviews and their conclusions.

In The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand described a stage of worship so intense that the worshipper himself becomes an object worthy of reverence. The profundity of the Rude Mech's production encapsulates this idea.

In the process it elevates not only actors but also humanity in its capacity for single-minded commitment to an ideal, into beings worthy of the greatest contemplation and respect. To borrow a well-known line from a famous Pee Wee Hunt song, that's a wonderful chance for somebody; gotta be somebody else, not me.