Check it out: Austin Bunn interviewed in www.wakegreatlakes.org about RUST. Look for Austin and company to take performances of RUST on the road in the near future, in addition to Iowa performances by our friends at Working Group Theatre.
Great Lakes Voices: An Interview with Playwright Austin Bunn
Rust is a play by Austin Bunn that chronicles the fallout after the closure of the GM plant in Wyoming, Michigan — just one event in the gradual loss of manufacturing jobs in the region. The play, developed with a “Creation Fund” grant from the National Performance Network, recently concluded its run at the Actors’ Theatre of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Plans for a fall 2012 tour of other sites in Michigan are already underway. Wake interviewed Austin Bunn shortly after the Grand Rapids run.
Wake: Rust is a documentary play. What does that mean, and why or how did it take that shape?
AB: The “documentary play” form has become as a successful new genre in American theatre — here, I think of The Laramie Project (about the murder of Matthew Shepard), The Exonerated (about the experiences of exonerated inmates), This Beautiful City (about the rise of the New Life Christian Church), or Anna Deveare Smith’s plays Let Me Down Easy and Fires in the Mirror. I’ve been interested in the form for years. Back when I was working as a magazine journalist, I looked at these powerful, immersive theatrical experiences with envy, since they seemed to accomplish what journalism was struggling to do: move people and make them think about an issue through storytelling. (…)
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