New Works by Murray Mednick

Theatre is alive and well and living in Los Angeles, thanks to veteran playwright Murray Mednick. On second thought, maybe the “alive” part is accurate but the “well” and “living” parts are up for conjecture, with his ongoing search for the meaning of life through his works. With over thirty years of playwriting behind him, Mednick continues to use theatrical format for theme and thesis. He presents us with thought-provoking images, situations and comments which are there for our scrutiny, ruminations, and the relationship of the material to our own lives — make that our own existence — in some manner. Self-examination doesn’t always come directly from what we’re watching but rather from what it evokes, provokes, or invokes from us and the world around us. Mednick’s current works in the duet of The Destruction of the 4th World and Clown Show for Bruno are definitely a vehicle for exploring the Jewish identity — the angst of a people who have been tossed hither and yon for centuries with their strong beliefs as their mucilage for survival. But then, we’ve all been tossed hither and yon at some level in some manner, so even though he focuses on the Jews, the confusion of existence is universal.

New Works by Murray Mednick at downtown’s Art Share L.A. is presented by the Padua Playwrights, the experimental theater group founded by Mednick over 30 years ago. As a matter of fact, regarding this latter theatrical liberty, Mednick accidentally walked in on a rehearsal of Destruction and caught a taste of how the material was being interpreted and staged, and then commented, “It’s not what I would do, but it’s interesting.” In theatre talk, that’s the well-travelled theory of Richard Schechner — that the play is merely the starting point. Not great recognition if you’re the playwright.

In The Destruction of the 4th World, we have the usual traumas of the nuclear, atomic, dysfunctional family that puts the “funk” in dysfunctional. The characters are slightly stereotypical, which is fine by me since I believe stereotypes had to start somewhere and are a good platform since they’re familiar even if you don’t agree with them. With the rapidly approaching Apocalypse, there is Bernie, the teenage boy with the usual teenage sturm und drang and unrecognized raging hormones (although there is the Native American/Indian/Hopi trickster Coyote mystically in Bernie’s consciousness participating with him in preparing for The End. I personally think Coyote represents the raging hormones). Bernie’s poor, perplexed and very caring father is trying to deal with the suicide of his wife and her ever-present ghost while being father to his two disparate sons — the other being his slightly orthodox Jewish son, David, who is struggling with his high goyim Jewish convert wife while questioning his own faith. Lest we forget there is the addle-pated holocaust survivor grandmother who, instead of “in my mind I’m going to Carolina” with James Taylor, in her mind she’s going to Brazil with Sergio Mendes and reminds us constantly.

But it all works. The theatre is small and intimate without being cramped, and the acting is skillfully the same, thereby involving the audience and eliminating the “fourth wall.” Instead of being spectators, we are involved with actors to the point of actually being one step away from being on stage and joining in.
By contrast, Clown Show for Bruno initially plays like pure burlesque or Comedia dell’arte. Three charming mime/clowns are waiting in a metaphoric “train” station for a metaphoric “train” they fortunately keep missing. In a series of synchronized vignettes, we learn about each character and their relationships to one another with all the exaggeration of Vaudeville; sometimes it’s painfully more than we’d like, since we know the ending whether we’d like to or not and whether we’re familiar with the program or not. They reenact the events that create the true story of Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer and artist killed by the Nazis after being taken in by a member of the SS and protected with his whereabouts eventually being revealed in a fit of spite by another SS member. Even with great humor presented in broad strokes and the playfulness of a carnival, they also control the mood which seamlessly shifts from one of humor to one of horror. Just when we start to participate in this playfulness, we’re pulled up short with a reality check of the actual moment.

These two plays were followed by the screening of Girl on a Bed, directed and adapted for the screen by Guy Zimmerman who also directed Clown Show for Bruno. This is from Murray Mednick’s critically acclaimed play “about a high school girl who walks fearlessly into lethal realms of pornography and drugs.” What was intriguing was not so much the material as the transformation of what was obviously originally a play to a play on film. We have a sense of theatre but we also don’t forget we are watching a movie, so our involvement that had been tangible for the two plays we saw previously now require a different kind of attention, which results in a different kind of theatrical experience.

The Destruction of the 4th World and Clown Show for Bruno, although very dissimilar in context and content, are united by a common sense of impending disaster but are impervious to the preparations being made — whether spiritual or physical, whether seen as if looking through the wrong end of the telescope or exaggerating life into a vaudeville show minus only the rim shots. I forgot — there are rim shots, except they are the gunshots killing Bruno. As whimsically charming as it all started, it’s all confusingly brutal and hopeless in the end. Mednick’s moral dilemma with a situation, seemingly incapable of a solution, remains as such. There is such urgency in the plays, and as an audience, it’s impossible to remain untouched, yet when it’s over, we’re not exhausted but rather we’re left with substantial food for thought rather than the more plebian grist for the mill.