Reviews for Rude Mechs Performances
Review: Field Guide by Rude Mechs
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 22, 2016
What the Rudes are demonstrating to you is the unavoidable truth that an unexamined life is really not worth living. And that we're examining our own lives almost not at all.
Field Guide is odd and arrogant, qualities with which the Rude Mechs are entirely comfortable. On a commission from Yale, they've undertaken to interpret in MechStyle the classic metaphysical thriller of the Western canon: Fyordor Dostoyevski's The Brothers Karamazov. And as Lowell Bartholomee breezily avows, most of them haven't bothered to read the whole novel. What you get is a sort of SNL/Idiot's Guide enactment of Dostoyevski's plot done with animated cardboard set pieces and …
Review: Fixing Timon of Athens by Rude Mechs
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 16, 2016
Kirk Lynn takes this sow's ear and turns it into a silk purse, well constructed, hand sewn, brightly spangled and furnished with language of 21st-century pungency.
In casting about for Shakespeare plays to mend with his own distinctive language and imagining, Kirk Lynn did well to choose Timon of Athens. It was published in the First Folio of 1623 and not much seems to be known about its history. Timon has the full five acts characteristic of Shakespearian and Elizabethan drama, but they're an awkward and uneasy assembly. It's easy to suppose that this piece, appearing seven years after Shakespeare's death, is the …
Review: Now Now Oh Now by the Rude Mechs
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 07, 2015
Entertaining, thought-provoking and a touch disturbing, this bracing 70 minutes of play is deeply serious. Just like the Rude Mechs themselves.
The Rude Mechs are looking for exactly thirty spectactor-participants to fill the seats at each performance in Now Now Oh Now. Or perhaps I should say at each experience of the work, for they carefully structure it to make those numerological thirty transit with them through the varieties of theatrical experience. Dress warmly, friends, for you'll wait in the yard outside the Off Center until summoned. The Rudes now promise to have a fire, which …
Review: Fixing King John by Rude Mechs
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 13, 2013
A wild ride, two hours or so including the intermission, Fixing King John doesn't so much fix/repair an inferior script as fix/set in our imaginations a portrait and a fable relevant to our own day, struggling mightily in contemporary American speech for meaning.
Kirk Lynn's script isn't Shakespeare. Fixing King John is a tight, fast story with dialogue full of fucking obscenities, one suited not for PBS but maybe to HBO. E. Jason Liebrecht creates King John as an edgy, angry, powerful capo with the force of Jimmy Cagney and the morals of Tony Soprano. Director Madge Darlington puts the Rude Mechs' staging into the confined space of their Off-Shoot rehearsal studio behind the Off-Center in east Austin. Audience members -- no, …
Review: CL(100)49(P) by Rude Mechs
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 16, 2012
One understands that this cake hasn't yet been baked. A central feature of the Rudes' methodology is to run their creative imaginings repeatedly with different audiences and different creative participants until somehow the scenes coalesce.
The Rude Mechanicals ran a workshop performance of some of a new and as yet unnamed piece last Friday at their Off Center stage behind Joe's Bakery in east Austin. They charged nothing to attend the single staging, but prospective attendees had to sign up through an on-line service for the gratis tickets. All available seats were reserved well ahead of time. The printed program was enigmatic, a single sheet with unexplained designs thrust into …
Review: Dionysus in '69 by Rude Mechs
by Michael Meigs
Published on December 05, 2009
Dionysus in 69 is more successful as a 'way-back machine than as an edition of Euripides, for the high-spirited, satirical use of a triple time line gets in the way of the original.
The Rude Mechanicals' Dionysus in 69 is a charming exercise in illustrative theatre historiography, one that captivates us by illustrating how sincere, how naive and how lucky we were to be living back in the dark, dark days of 1968.Back in 1968, the Performance Group's interpretation of Euripides' The Bacchae resounded with the times. Their canny staging of the ancient classic about violence, ritual, unknowing and ecstasy scandalized conventional citizens and captured the imagination of the young -- that …