Murray Mednick’s Three Tables

Repeating the Past to the End

By Steven Leigh Morris

Mother Earth (image provided by NASA)

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This is our cultural moment, brought to us by fervent theology, blended into the politics of resentment, and stoked by social media — a dogged determination to return not to the 1950s, but to the 1550s, to principles of zealous conquests and the gratuitous cruelty of those conquests.

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The times have caught up to playwright Murray Mednick, now an octogenarian, who has sustained a singular, uncompromising vision in his plays over the course of half a century. The vision is grim, but not without humor. I found myself smiling throughout his latest play, Three Tables, but unable to laugh. That feels just about right for this cultural moment, though it’s getting harder even to smile.

To give an example, I teach a public speaking course at Cal State. This week, one of my students, a young man, gave an earnest presentation of a view he’d found — and found reinforced — on TikTok.

He tried to persuade the class, in earnest, that the world is flat, as is written in the Bible. True, many in the class started giggling during his presentation, but the speaker was as undeterred as he was sincere. After he concluded, I mentioned that his point of view, and the religious conviction from which it springs, was prevalent for many millennia until Galileo, at some point in the early 1600s, questioned it, along with the premise that the sun spins around the Earth – for which he, Galileo, was persecuted by the Church and prosecuted. How do we know what we think we know is true?

For four centuries now, scientists from all corners of our very round planet have been piling up evidence supporting the rotundity of our world, not to mention the innumerable photographs of Earth and our neighbor planets taken from space. They all look roundish, more or less.

There was no convincing this speaker, who, citing Plato’s allegory of the cave, said that it’s folly to believe our own eyes. He also asserted with equal assurance that the 1969 moon landing was a fiction, along with all the photos of Earth taken from the Apollo space capsule. “It’s not possible,” he argued, regarding NASA’s ability to send a rocket hurtling towards the moon, to land a manned capsule on the lunar surface, and then to return the whole kit-and-kaboodle safe and sound into the Pacific Ocean. He offered to send links that he’d found on TikTok to skeptical classmates, in order to “prove” his point.

I’ve been teaching this class, at this same university for over 30 years. Never before, in those decades, have I confronted a speaker so eager to dismiss the laws of physics as a conspiracy theory. This is our cultural moment, brought to us by fervent theology, blended into the politics of resentment, and stoked by social media — a dogged determination to return not to the 1950s, but to the 1550s, to principles of zealous conquests and the gratuitous cruelty of those conquests.

There’s a growing sentiment that the Holocaust, too was a fiction, or that the Russian invasion of Ukraine, like Nazi Germany’s incursions into other European nations, was a battle against the anti-Christ. War crimes are a mere invention, a political cudgel – so argue the defenders of ignorance and barbarity. As the poet W.B Yeats, wrote in “The Second Coming”: “The best lack conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” — rephrased by Joni Mitchell in her “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” as “the worst are full of passion without mercy.”

The Trial of Galileo in Rome, 1633

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One could argue that attending Three Tables is like watching a slightly staged poetry reading of Yeats’s “The Second Coming” as performed in a kind of Borscht Belt vernacular by eight actors.  

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All of this despondency-triggering lunacy is contained within Mednick’s beautiful, profound Three Tables, presented by Padua Playwrights at the Zephyr Theatre and directed by the playwright.

In years gone by, in a cycle of six plays called The Gary Plays, plus Joe and Betty, 16 Routines and Mrs. Feuerstein, Mednick has written about the criminal underground and creative life in Los Angeles, as well as his own past in Brooklyn, framed by the ever-present echoes of the Holocaust. As in all fine writers, an autobiographical ache permeates the body of his writing.  

Mednick is a poet. As such, his stage works, at least his more recent productions, do not indulge in visual extravagance. They are word-centric. Sound-centric. Characters, largely sitting in one place, speak in clipped cadences, more often than not speaking past each other. One could argue that attending Three Tables is like watching a slightly staged poetry reading of Yeats’s “The Second Coming” as performed in a kind of Borscht Belt vernacular by eight actors.  

There are at least three aspects that make up the totality of Mednick’s singular vision — one for each table at Mednick’s restaurant, set in some unspecified place far from New York.

At one table upstage right sit two aging intellectual waiters, Sol and Joe (Richard Sabine and John Fantasia). They loathe their customers, wielding fantasies of spitting in their food (if not beating them up) before realizing that, being “of the Book,” they’re too old and too ineffectual.

“The ghost of Samuel Beckett haunts us, Joe.”

And so, they serve with as much courtesy as they can reluctantly muster.

They’re also haunted by the Holocaust. For those who believe that we can’t live in the past, they counter that the past lives within us: “History is floating in and above the ground, like an ocean.”

At the center table sits a trio of actors (Michael Uribes, Laura Liguori and Corey Reiger) devising a play, in which a mythical character named Naomi will be drowned in a well (the end of the bringer of water, which certainly resonates in the American Southwest right now) leading to a desert-scape with flames leaping through the crevices. “This is no representation,” one of them says, “It’s the reality.”

Christen (Liguori) finds masturbation more satisfying than sex, or connection. Indeed, their dialogue intercuts, as though they’re only half listening to each other, and talking past each other. Rodger (Uribes) who one can infer was Christen’s lover, responds to Christen’s assertion with pained bemusement. Uribes personifies comic-tragedy, with an aura of Billy Crystal. Entire riffs repeat, as though thoughts themselves are pre-programmed platitudes. The play’s meaning doesn’t lie just in the words, but in the sounds. In the musicality. This is perfectly rendered by the ensemble.

Indeed, at the third table, stage left, sits another trio of thespians. One of them, Dennis Renard, transcends the spoken word when he sings his lines, as though in some ancient Greek chorus.  This trio (Eric Stanton Betts, Raquel Cain and Renard) collectively portray a haughty condescension to the Establishment where they’ve landed, harboring the illusion, while traveling through life at world’s end, that they’re more important than they are.

The ensemble of THREE TABLES (Photo by Jenny Graham)

One can’t acknowledge this production’s musicality without a nod to John Zalewski’s original music and sound design, with its sequences of deeply resonating rumbling, a sinister underscoring.

Shon LeBlanc’s costumes display symbols related to Semitism and to the Holocaust. Many of the characters wear Stars of David; Uribes wears a T-shirt with a cargo steam train, adjoining a Star of David. When Betts turns his back, his shirt reveals barbed wire running in horizontal strips.  

Joel Daavid’s set features a checkerboard floor with three tattered panels suspended across the upstage. Each of these is a collage containing snippets of Hebrew and what appear to be remnants of prisoner ID numbers. Stage right is a door contained within an arch. Beyond that door is the beginning, and the end.

Among Christen’s anxieties is a “knock at the door” she experienced when being stalked. But the knock at the door is as metaphysical as it is psychological. Older Germans recoil at those words, recalling the SS coming in the pre-dawn hours to arrest those deemed insufficiently patriotic.  Older Russians recoil at those words, recalling the dread of Stalin’s henchman coming in the pre-dawn hours to take their victims to the gulag. Musicologists refer to the opening chords in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as “death knocking at the door.”

And that’s how this play ends, too. That shouldn’t be a spoiler, unless you’ve been living in a pipe dream.   

After reaching the age of about 40, Samuel Beckett spent his next four decades writing about the end of the world. The same could be said of Mednick. His isn’t a despondency born of unearned cynicism, but of keen observation and acceptance and slightly impish humor.

He arrives at his conclusion, in all senses of that word, without explanation, but instead through the accruing of words, shards of meaning, and sounds that all crash into each other — forging a larger truth, as is only possible in a poem or a piece of music.

THREE TABLES | Written and directed by Murray Mednick | Presented by Padua Playwrights at the Zephyr Theatre, 7456 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood | Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 3 pm; through May 22. https://onstage411.com/tables