Three Tables
Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris
Padua Playwrights at the Zephyr Theatre
Through May 22
RECOMMENDED
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.
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.”
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, under Mednick’s direction.
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.
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.
For a deeper dive, See Stage Feature
Padua Playwrights at the Zephyr Theatre, 7456 Melrose Ave., Hlwyd.; Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 3 pm; through May 22. https://onstage411.com/tables
