Field Guide
by Rude Mechs

Apr. 07 - Apr. 30, 2016
Thursdays-Sundays

CTX Live Theatre Review

 Rude Mechs is thrilled to deliver to Austin the second installment of our original work-in-progress, Field Guide. 

About The Play

IT’S COUPLES’ SKATE! Let’s hold hands and glide through the longest novel ever navigating thin-ice patches of intellectualism, spiritualism, sensualism and hedonism mixed with stand-up comedy, stompy dancing, a cardboard bear and his geometric friends. Then let’s cuddle around the keg and translate the whole thing together, please because it’s still a work-in-progress and we learned so much from you the last time. Waddya say?

Yes, this is what we have so far. Rude Mechs creates new works from scratch. So just like when a playwright writes a new play and they get table reads or staged reads or dramaturgy support at various theaters around the country, we also road-test our work. We just do it in front of our Austin audience. Each iteration of the work separates itself from its predecessor based on the feedback we received the last time, our own interests, and better ideas. Changes may be nuanced or radical. We have no way of knowing until we begin the work.

 

(via Rude Mechs)

 

Rude Mechs creates new works collaboratively, and we believe it is important to acknowledge the work that is done prior to getting the show ready for production. This work begins often with the Co-Producing Artistic Directors finding consensus around a project’s concept. That done, a collaborative team refines the concept, develops content, structure and style, and gets the piece on its feet. This collaborative team eventually expands to envelop to the entire production team as the work is created.
On the ice: Mari Akita, Lowell Bartholomee, Robert S. Fisher, Thomas Graves, Hannah Kenah, Lana Lesley
Creative Team:  Mari Akita, Lowell Bartholomee, Kenny Chilton, Eva Claycomb, Madge Darlington, Eric Dyer, Robert  Fisher, Aaron Flynn, Thomas Graves, Kevin Jacaman, Nate Jackson, Alexa Kelly, Hannah Kenah, Lana Lesley, Kevin Long, Kirk Lynn, Graham Reynolds, Brian Scott, Shawn Sides, Dallas Tate.
Production Photos: Photos available upon request.
Press Resources:  http://rudemechs.com/aboutus/press/
Production Support: Field Guide is commissioned and developed by Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, CT, James Bundy, Artistic Director and Victoria Nolan, Managing Director. Creation support for this project also comes in part from from The MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, Mid-America Arts Alliance and foundations, corporations and individuals throughout Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas, and The National Endowment for the Arts, because a great nation deserves great art.

 

About Rude Mechs

Rude Mechs is an Austin-based collective theatre company that has created a genre-averse cocktail of over 30 original plays that we have produced at our venue, The Off Center, in Austin, TX, since 1999. And when we are lucky, we get to tour our work nationally and internationally. Our most recent productions include Stop Hitting Yourself, which premiered in Lincoln Center Theatre in New York in January 2014, toured to Dallas and San Francisco 2015, and Now Now Oh Now, a National Theatre Pilot selectee currently touring to Duke University, Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, and Miami Light, Fringe arts in Philly, and The Method Gun, which has toured to such far-flung destinations as New York City, Los Angeles, New Haven, Columbus, Boston, Portland, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Brisbane (Australia) is set for Houston, TX, May 2016.

Since our first season in 1996, we’ve received over a billion awards and nominations (mostly nominations) for artistic excellence, including a 2013 BESSIE nomination for our re-enactment of The Performance Group's Dionysus in 69,  and the prestigious Doris Duke Artist Award for Shawn Sides 2015. Rude Mechs was honored with an induction to The Austin Arts Hall of Fame in 2013, and featured in a nationally aired PBS documentary called Arts in Context: Rude Mechs.

                        ***

Understand life the way a bird book tells you how to name the different species Field Guide will capture the discrete experiences which add up to a so-called life in this present national community arrangement you’ve become involved with including advice clubs dog parties and cardboard pain meters that can distinguish with a new accuracy your own level of discomfort relative to friends or friends on facebook or characters in fiction who have begun for the Rudes to walk out of the books like The Brothers Karamazov and do our chores with us making lunches and taking the kids to work and helping us compose our new performance Field Guide as stand up routine road tested in all the open mic comedy clubs to get the temperature just right so you can know which laughter at the right agony is most advantageous for achieving climax every time and spectacle

Production Support: Field Guide is commissioned and developed by Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, CT, James Bundy, Artistic Director and Victoria Nolan, Managing Director. Creation support for this project also comes in part from from The MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, Mid-America Arts Alliance and foundations, corporations and individuals throughout Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas, and The National Endowment for the Arts, because a great nation deserves great art.

 

(photo by Harry Whittier Fries, via rudemechs.org)

 

Rude Mechs creates new works collaboratively, and we believe it is important to acknowledge the work that is done prior to getting the show ready for production. This work begins often with the Co-Producing Artistic Directors finding consensus around a project’s concept. That done, a collaborative team refines the concept, develops content, structure and style, and gets the piece on its feet. This collaborative team eventually expands to envelop to the entire production team as the work is created.

Cat photos by Harry Whittier Fries

March 19 – 29, 2015
1st draft workshop showing

Creation Collaborators

  • Lowell Bartholomee
  • Madge Darlington
  • Robert S. Fisher
  • Thomas Graves
  • Hannah Kenah
  • Lana Lesley
  • Kirk Lynn
  • Graham Reynolds
  • Brian Scott
  • Shawn Sides

Production Team

  • Lighting – Stephen Pruitt
  • Crew – Alexandra Bassett
  • Box Office / FOH Managers – Kyle and Tina Van Winkle
  • Stage Manager – Sam Accettulli

What We Were Ever Thinking

The creation process for Field Guide began in Fall 2014 with the Co-Producing Artistic Directors in the earliest concept phase. Company Members joined in November and then in December, we all headed off to Yale for a 9-day residency where we generated material. We put it all away until the first week of March – we generated more material and ruthlessly cut and shaped the piece to make it audience-ready.

Rude Mechs completed this workshop showing of the first draft in March 2015 (3/19 – 3/29). Tickets were free and a post-show feedback session was held after every performance to solicit ideas and critique from our patrons.

To date, the piece has been flitting around how to be a good person, or how to live the best life possible: The Brothers Karamazov; Yul Brynner’s forehead; stand-up comedy; dancing; meditation; Jack Kerouac; and acting cubes. We will present a more complete picture of the piece in April 2016.

“Alexei doesn’t get a lot of time in the stage adaptations and the movie we found because, I think, it’s hard to depict spiritual longing… as opposed to action – you know, like Dmitri running around drinking, gambling and hitting people – that’s easy.”

Field Guide
by Rude Mechs ensemble
Rude Mechs

Thursdays-Sundays,
April 07 - April 30, 2016
Off Center
2211-A Hidalgo Street
near Robert Martinez and E. 7th Street, behind Joe's Bakery
Austin, TX, 78702

Presented Thursdays - Sundays at 8 p.m.

Field Guide‘s opening weekend, April 7 – 10, is presented by Fusebox Festival. Fusebox Festival events are free to attend (yes!). You can make your reservation for Field Guide, or any of the other amazing festival events and performances through their website.

For the rest of the run, April 14 – 30, you can get your tickets right here.

Tickets are $25 on Fridays and Saturdays.

Tickets are Sliding Scale $5 to $25 on Thursdays and Sundays.

You will receive a receipt via email from support@artful.ly. Check your spam folder. If you did not receive a receipt, you do not have a ticket. Email us if you want us to check for you. It’s easy. We are happy to.

A waiting list will begin in person at the box office one hour prior to each performance. Unclaimed tickets will be released to the waiting list at 7:55pm.

We can refund tickets and we can exchange tickets for a different performance if there are seats available. We cannot do either of those things within 24 hours of the performance in question.

Your tickets are transferrable to another person – you just need to email us and let us know their name (the reservation will stay under your name). If we don’t have the name, we can’t let them use the ticket.