As a means of identifying what is essential about theatre, both in its making and its spectator-ship, we offer as case study Wesleyan University’s theatrical production of The Method Gun, performed on Zoom and broadcast via livestream on May 1–2, 2020. In this essay, structured as a conversation between director Katie Pearl and spectator Jaclyn Pryor, we coin the neologism “total dramaturgical collapse” to name the phenomenon in which multiple diegetic and non-diegetic dramaturgies intersect during the course of a performance event, casting both fictional and nonfictional narratives into urgent and sharp relief. Because of the context of COVID-19 within which The Method Gun was suddenly operating, the necessity of theatre suddenly rang clear. The performance process and production became a container through which the audience and creative team could confront their feelings of isolation and loss in the early weeks and months of shelter-in-place, while reawakening a shared sense of what is indispensable about theatre: imagination; collaboration; the ability to create community, even amid separation; and the vitality of risk, both fictional and real.
Jaclyn Pryor:
Let’s begin with you telling us about the show.
Katie Pearl:
Sure. The Method Gun was originally created by The Rude Mechs of Austin, Texas, and had its national premiere at The Humana Festival of New Plays in 2010. The play follows a group of actors who are company members and devotees of an actor-training guru named Stella Burden. Burden teaches what is known as the most dangerous acting technique in the world: The Approach. She believes that danger and risk are essential to truth and beauty in theatre; as a promise of that, she keeps a loaded gun in the rehearsal room.
The inciting incident for the play is Burden abandoning her company while her students are engaged in a nine-year rehearsal process of a version of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire—without the main characters of Stanley, Stella, Mitch, or Blanche. In other words, the company members are playing only the minor characters in Streetcar.
JP:
I want to make sure that our readers understand the convention that you are describing. The characters in The Method Gun are trying to stage Streetcar without any of the main characters: what happens in The Method Gun when we get to those characters’ lines?
KP:
The Rudes use a couple of techniques. One is that they look straight at the audience: the audience becomes those characters. There is silence where the lines would have been spoken, and they respond to the unsaid lines. Sometimes they use a light cue. And there’s very beautiful music composed by Graham Reynolds that runs throughout the show that begins to feel like the missing characters.
JP:
Yes. The most memorable example of this is the final scene in the Rudes’s original production—which I saw when it premiered in Austin. After we’ve been watching them prepare for this moment the entire play, the ensemble enacts all of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire from start to finish with only the minor characters—the tamale vendor, the Evening Star collector, the doctor, the nurse—and no spoken text, just highly choreographed movement. All while a dozen or so terrifyingly real ghost lights, which are attached to long metal poles, swing like pendulums from the grid with great force and velocity, barely near-missing the actors’ skin. It was breathtaking.
KP:
It was. And filled with risk. You can see some of it in the trailer for their production.
JP:
But you did something else entirely, which was equally mesmerizing. Tell us about your approach to that final scene.
KP:
I knew I couldn’t do the swinging lights, and I didn’t want to. The original proposal I made to the Rudes is that I redevise the play with students—so there was never an expectation that we would mimic their blocking. But as playwright and Rudes’s co-producing artistic director Kirk Lynn said to me, and I agree, something is dangerous only if it’s actually dangerous. If it’s fake dangerous, it doesn’t really work.
JP:
So what was your solution?
KP:
There’s a lot of bowling that happens in Streetcar. I kept imagining if bowling balls could be released down a raked stage, there could be similar near misses that would still be beautiful and startling, but wouldn’t be quite so damaging if someone messed up. So I got the physics department to loan us the bowling balls; my math-major ASM calculated how fast the balls would be rolling based on force and slope; and we figured out what the beat was [snaps] of releasing the balls [snaps]. We built the whole choreography around it [snaps]. We got all the way to a first stumble through while we were still on campus.
JP:
Walk us through what happens in March 2020.
KP:
Everyone is on spring break. One by one, universities are shutting down due to COVID-19. An email from the Wesleyan University president lands in our inboxes saying that the rest of the semester is going to be online. Like many of us in the midst of directing shows, my first thought was “Well, this can’t happen.” At that time, I had no idea how to make a play into a virtual event. We were able to have one last in-person meeting before everyone was sent home. I laugh about it now because everybody was wearing masks for the . . . [pauses]. Were people wearing masks? No. No, we weren’t wearing masks.
JP:
Yeah, masks weren’t a thing yet!
KP:
No, we weren’t wearing masks! Some people were already home quarantining—in Seattle, in Singapore. Some were in cars being driven home by their parents. And some were in the theatre building with me. The students and I decided that we would each go home and meet on this thing called “Zoom.” We didn’t even know what Zoom was. We would read the script aloud, see what still worked online, and then decide how we felt about it. Do we want to let it go? Do we continue? How do we do that?
JP:
I’m curious what that first read-through on Zoom was like, because as a spectator to what you ultimately created, the show felt so live and Zoom so right as a venue.
KP:
It felt like holding onto a life raft. The cast and I needed each other so much; we felt so lucky that we had this excuse of rehearsal to come together, to be together. And I remember feeling surprised that a lot of the show still made sense. And weirded out that we were talking to each other from these little boxes. We went through what I imagine everybody in the theatre went through, with the actors asking, “Where do I look? Do we do our blocking in our rooms as though I’m talking like the person is right here?” We did simple experiments: what happens if you look at your green dot? Oh, that’s interesting. What happens if you’re far back from your camera . . . Oh, wow. Get up from your chair! Yes, it’s really different if you’re in the center of your screen than if you’re over to the side. We started tracking the new Zoom-staging language really fast.
JP:
I know that some of your ensemble included international students, as well as domestic students all over the country. How did that work?
KP:
We now had actors in three continents and four time zones, so we had to radically change the way that we thought about our rehearsal hours. The actors said, “Maybe we won’t always come to rehearsal. This is really intense. We really have to take mental health days.” All there was to say was, “Okay.” So much that we consider essential about theatre-making—everybody needs to be in rehearsal; everybody has to come on time; you have to memorize your lines; you have to do this, you have to do that—all of that went out the window. In the performance that you saw, the actors were reading their lines off their computers because we were changing things up until the last second. But we could, because their scripts were right there on a Google Doc.
JP:
All of the things that we think of as essential in the process of creation got thrown out the window, as you say, but what essentials remained?
KP:
We had to say “yes” to all of our given circumstances. This is something that you and I both know and have talked about elsewhere in terms of site-specificity: you can’t turn a space into a different space. And so we didn’t try to turn Zoom into what it was not. And when we finally released into that acceptance, it started opening up all sorts of new possibilities in terms of the script. That was the fun part.
JP:
What were some of the rewrites that emerged out of your realization about Zoom and site-specificity?
KP:
There was this big mobius strip conversation that the actors kept having: our actor-selves are obviously not in the same room, but are our Stella Burden characters? That conundrum led us to use strategies, including sense memory exercises, that allowed us to bring into the room things that were actually absent.
JP:
Can you explain sense memory?
KP:
Sense memory is a technique developed by the Method Acting guru Lee Strasberg, whereby the actor recalls the physical sensations surrounding a personal, emotional experience and uses those sensations to help trigger truthful emotional responses in their character. It’s the idea that “acting is being.” There’s a famous story about John Gielgud and Dustin Hoffman during the filming of Marathon Man, when Hoffman has stayed up for three nights in a row and done all of these massively masochistic things to produce a state in himself that was like that of his character. Gielgud just looked at him and said, “You should really try acting, my dear.”
When you get down to it, the sense memory technique, and really Method Acting in general, is just asking you to live deeply in your imagination. It’s asking your imagined reality to become your real reality. And as we were going deeper and deeper into Zoom, we realized that imagination is all that we had. If we wanted to have a real emotional experience of being touched, for example, our only option was to imagine it—both as actors and as characters. In fact, our rehearsals themselves ended with a group sense memory exercise that recalled the way we ended our work every night in the rehearsal room: standing in a circle with our arms draped onto each other’s shoulders.
JP:
That’s very powerful. And sense memory exercises found their way into the revised script itself, right? How did that happen?
KP:
There’s a scene in the original production of The Method Gun where the character of Elizabeth is upset and Robert, who is obsessed with her, uses it as an excuse to give her a hug—and he hugs her for a little too long and everybody’s watching and it’s uncomfortable. But we couldn’t do that because now the actor Liz Woolford is in Virginia and the actor Max Halperin is in Connecticut. So in our Zoom show we had the character of Robert demand that the character of Elizabeth do a sense memory exercise with him so that together they can experience him hugging her. Here’s a clip of that: Scene: Robert Hugs Elizabeth.
JP:
Another compelling use of memory in your production is the scene in which the actors watch footage of themselves in rehearsal prior to COVID, which I presume you had captured with no awareness that it would ever be shown to the public. It was so haunting to witness.
KP:
Yes. When we discovered that we had that video and could watch it as a Zoom background, we were so happy. We felt grateful. This simple technology gave us a way to witness and share ourselves in the place that we wished we were. The scene became a dramaturgical collapse of the longing that the actors felt and the longing that the audience felt—for what was. Here it is: Scene: Students watch themselves rehearse.
JP:
For me, knowing how far apart everybody was created this longing to connect as an audience member, too. Because I’m also literally alone—watching from my bedroom in Portland and wanting to be close to the performers and to the rest of the audience—which was full of people that I know and love: Kirk Lynn, Katie Dawson, Deb Margolin, you. And that was part of what was so moving: this unexpected joy of being together with other humans—which is essential to theatre.
KP:
Yes, and ironically, much of American theatre asks the audience to ignore that we’re in the theatre; we’ve deprived ourselves of that connection. We’ve gotten used to bringing down the lights so we can forget each other, so that we can be wholly in the world of the play with the actors. But it’s good to remember that in the Festival Dionysus, it was daylight. Audiences were all jammed in together. It wasn’t at all about forgetting one another, or transporting ourselves to some other reality.
JP:
Right! What you are describing is this total awareness the entire time that this is “theatre.” While there is some willing suspension of disbelief in terms of the fiction of Streetcar and the fiction of the Stella Burden Company pretending to enact it, we never forget the context in which we are viewing—which is sitting on our beds, our couches, at our kitchen tables, during a livestream production on Zoom via YouTube—because it is May 2, 2020 and we are in the midst of a deadly global pandemic.
KP:
I felt that the actors needed to acknowledge that.
JP:
At what point did you realize how the production resonated with the current historical moment?
KP:
As we were releasing into and accepting that Zoom is where we were, we were also recognizing that every person in the ensemble was going through a very particular, strange, hard, and lonely time: a time of great loss, high risk, and no answers. And that’s the same experience that those actors in the Stella Burden Company were going through after losing their teacher. So we started tracking the parallel dramaturgies—doing improvs based on our real-life quarantine experiences—and mapping those onto the Stella Burden narrative to see where the two stories could become one. For instance, isolation: what if the Stella Burden Company members chose to isolate, just as we’re being forced to isolate? What if it was a training technique of the Approach that everyone went through? We bent the fiction to meet the moment.
JP:
Yes, and as a spectator, what was particularly compelling was not only the parallel dramaturgies of your students’ experience of loss and that of the Stella Burden Company after their teacher’s disappearance, but how both also resonated so strongly with our own experience in the audience at this historical moment.
KP:
I think that was what was such a sweet surprise to us: that the dramaturgical collapse we were recognizing between the actors and the characters was also felt by the audience. And of course it did: we were all going through the same thing.
JP:
The scenes that were the most moving to me were those in which the Stella Burden ensemble were trying to reenact Streetcar, because there is an additional layer of loss that comes from the dramaturgy of Williams’s text.
Let’s look at the video from the Paperboy scene, for example, which is pulled directly from Williams’s script (Scene: Paperboy). The boy is in the center box of the Zoom grid, wearing a newsie cap, with a messenger bag slung across his chest. And it’s the student-actor who is in Macedonia, right?
KP:
Yes, Leon Ristov.
JP:
Leon. He’s just so young and endearing. And we have this piano score created by your student composer that we’ve come to recognize as Blanche, which is playing underneath. And the ensemble, who are in the boxes around him, are moving simultaneously—lifting a glass, twirling their hair—and these small gestures stand in for Blanche, too. The moment that stands out to me most is when he offers her a light, and we just see the corona of his flame. And we see only her hands—holding an imaginary cigarette. It’s just the gesture: an imaginary cigarette held up to her lips. And the flame, of course, never touches the cigarette, because Leon’s flame is in Macedonia and the Blanches are all over the world. So of course they can’t touch! It’s gestic, in the Brechtian sense: it captures the absolute essence of this moment in Williams’s play—which is longing for connection amidst so much disconnection and loss—and feels so resonant with this desire to touch and be touched in this moment of pandemic, when touching can be lethal.
KP:
I’ve been watching these conversations with Anne Bogart and Elizabeth Streb about their recent collaboration, Falling & Loving. For Anne, everything that happens in the theatre is metaphor—it’s the sine qua non of theatre—and what you’re describing is metaphor. But Streb argues that there is no metaphor. Her actors are trying to avoid being hurt while hurling through space: that’s all that’s happening. And that was really true for us, too: the actual task was literal. We were simply trying to get the essence of what we had developed in a rehearsal room onto a Zoom screen. It was quite a prosaic process.
JP:
Yet the result was so metaphorical. Your choice to use multiple Blanches in that scene actually heightened the feeling of her not being there. Their gestures, along with the piano, felt like the ghost of Blanche, a dream of Blanche, a phantasmagoria.
KP:
Because she is actually his fantasy, right? The paperboy isn’t interacting with Blanche, the human being, ever in Streetcar. He is interacting with his own romantic vision of this older, fascinating woman. And I want to give a shout out to my student AD and choreographer, Will Blumberg, who did a lot of that physical work.
JP:
Maybe now it would be helpful to hear about the climactic sequence in The Method Gun—what you call the “dream ballet”—where we see all of Streetcar performed with only the minor characters. We’ve talked about what it looked like in the Rudes’s production in Austin, and you described what it was meant to look like in the theatre at Wesleyan—with bowling balls being released down a raked stage. What did it end up looking like on Zoom? (See figure 1.)
KP:
We kept putting off figuring out how to do that climax. Because in the stage version of the play, the whole show is beautiful and risky and true, and then you get to the dream ballet and it is the most . . . it is the mostbeautiful, risky, and true. But here we felt, as an ensemble, there’s nothing else we can do. We’ve done it. We’ve used all the low-tech ingenuity we could muster to make the earlier scenes work. The students had come up with incredible staging solutions that led to beautiful, strange moments throughout. We didn’t feel that we could top it.
And then I had a flash of we just have to lean further into its impossibility; we have to tell, not do. It’s the opposite of what you learn is essential about acting, about playwriting! We had to strip it bare and just describe it.
And that’s all the audience gets to see: the actors imagining. The actors remembering. There is no magic to it all. You see the students unroll their green screens—which are makeshift pieces of fabric—and tape them to their bedroom walls and closet doors. A few of them briefly explain how the scene would have happened in person, and then the audience sees them all turn their virtual backgrounds to black—the void of their loss, of their shared imagination.
JP:
Can you read to us the stage directions at this moment in the play?
KP:
“Carefully, precisely, with total buy-in and deep concentration, the students narrate every single moment of their final performance of Streetcar. It is beautiful and complex. They hold still, living out the entire show in their minds, which means it is actually happening and it matters.” Then we hear Liz say, “Start the play,” and a metronome begins:
LIZ:
Blanche arrives.
MAX:
Enter stage right. Look forward. Go.
ESMÉ:
Leaning, fan myself. Laughing.
ROBYN:
Laughing.
LIZ:
Laughing.
MAX:
Cross stage. Near miss. Tuck in shirt with one hand. Turn: Eunice. Lock hands. Hand off beer.
LIZ:
Turn to Steve. Take beer.
ROBYN:
Laughing.
MAX:
Near Miss. Exit.
ESMÉ:
Twirl into chair.
LIZ:
Piano chord.
ESMÉ:
Who’s that?
ROBYN:
Snap head to the left.
LIZ:
Snap head back front.
ROBYN:
Near Miss. And . . . Exit.
And it carries on like that for the whole of Streetcar.
JP:
There are simple movements: a can of beer is brought to the lips, a head snaps to the left . . .
KP:
Yes, the gestures are very spare. It helps the audience to imagine with us.
JP:
And we’re also remembering, along with actors, the earlier moment in the rehearsal room—because we know that we’re hearing something that was meant to be embodied, but now can’t be. Your production really reminded me, as a physical theatre artist, that virtuosity need not be physical, or epic. Virtuosity can be subtle, like a head turn; and it can be dramaturgical—like a brilliant string of spoken stage directions.
(Scene: Dream Ballet)
JP:
Let’s turn now to how your show ends, which is also how it begins. Early on, you ask the audience to text your stage manager the name of a teacher who has had a profound impact on them; at the end, you share these names like credits rolling at the end of a film.
KP:
Those names were often of someone who is gone, or someone whom the audience member hasn’t seen in a very long while. The last action of the show is a round of Crying Practice—as part of the Approach, the Stella Burden actors learn to make themselves cry. At this end moment of the show, it feels more like the Wesleyan students themselves are doing the same exercise. About sixty seconds in, the names start scrolling. After all of the absence and loss that is felt and expressed throughout the whole show, there is suddenly yet another dimension of loss, of distance, of longing, of appreciation, and of grief scrolling in front of your eyes. And the actors are crying. It’s the final dramaturgical collapse (Scene: Final Crying Practice).
JP:
What teachers’ names do you remember from the different performances that stand out to you?
KP:
Well, there’s always the theatre greats. When Joe Papp’s name shows up, I know that Morgan Jenness is in the audience. When María Irene Fornés shows up, I know that my partner, Michelle Memran, is there. So it’s also a way of seeing the legacy and the history of American theatre. And there are also names there you don’t recognize, but you know they have made an indelible impact on someone there with you.
I think, especially in pandemic time, there’s something comforting about that. Even in this circumstance that no one could ever have ever predicted, lineage persists. Links are sustaining. This moment is going to become an essential part of the timeline of American theatre.