The Method Gun

Welcome to the world of Stella Burden

An actor-training guru of the 60s and 70s, whose sudden emigration to South America still haunts her most fervent followers. Ms. Burden’s training technique, The Approach (often referred to as “the most dangerous acting technique in the world”), fused Western acting methods with risk-based rituals in order to give even the smallest role a touch of sex, death and violence.

The Method Gun uses found text from actual journals and performance reports from the final months of rehearsals for Ms. Burden’s nine-years-in-the-making production of A Streetcar Named Desire. A play about the ecstasy and excesses of performing, the dangers of public intimacy and the incompatibility of truth on stage and sanity in real life.

Blank and Jensen interviewed some 35 people—a cross-section of lives interrupted—who fled the chaos and violence that befell Iraqi society for the relative safety of Jordan. Following the visit to Amman, these encounters were crafted into a jarring, illuminating and unforgettable play that gives voice to the upheaval of everyday life in a country struggling to find its way back home.