Image: Parksville, New York: Heart of the Borscht Belt
Remembering Murray Mednick
A Playwright of Borscht Belt Majesty
Playwright-director Murray Mednick has died at the age of 85. He was many things, but first and foremost, he was a poet. He was dedicated, in his words, to “the sound and rhythm and the beauty of language.” His love of language, of its rigors, of its cadences, emerged in lean and witty repartees, and in soliloquies so internal and yet expansive, they could have been crafted by Robert Frost.
He lived long enough that he may have meant different things to different people. He had a homecoming of sorts, to New York, in 2003, when his play Joe and Betty was performed there. I was lucky enough to write a feature in the The New York Times about that homecoming. Among the reasons I got the assignment is that I was L.A.-based, and so was Murray. After working at Theatre Genesis in New York, he left the East Coast to settle in Los Angeles in 1974 at the age of 34, when he was invited by the Mark Taper Forum to work on an adaptation of The Oresteia.
Joe and Betty was about his childhood in Brooklyn, and his parents, who as he put it, spent day and night destroying each other. He framed this saga within the confines of Borscht Belt absurdism.
To those of us attached to the longer tether of creative life in this region, Murray will be remembered for creating and organizing the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival with John Woodruff. This was an annual, outdoor workshop of new works that countered the commercial entertainment impulses that still prevail. The festival was staged in the rustic hills above Claremont, at the very edge of Los Angeles County. This was initially funded in 1978 as part of faculty position at La Verne University, and it included a cadre of writers, some from Theatre Genesis, including Sam Shepard and María Irene Fornés. (I remember seeing her play Mud, a comedy about a miserable rural couple, stage outdoors on a crude stage, around that time.) Other writers who gravitated towards Padua included Jon Robin Baitz, John Steppling, John O’Keefe, and Kelly Stuart. The Festival moved around L.A. after its departure from Claremont, and eventually came under the helm of playwright Guy Zimmerman, and he had long-standing associations with playwright Hank Bunker and actors such as Norbert Weisser.
Perhaps Murray’s most striking quality, aside from his dedication to poeticism, was the way he eschewed attention placed on himself. He was shy and soft-spoken, the antithesis of a narcissist. Somehow it felt just right that the Padua festival took place on the margins of Los Angeles.
The last play I saw of his was at the Zephyr Theatre in 2023. It was called Three Tables. Such a simple premise. Three different, sometimes overlapping, trivial conversations. Such a small idea that somehow encompassed the absurdities and magnitudes of what used to be called “the human condition.” Philosophically, it was akin to T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.”
Something he said during our interview continues to resonate: “There are successful plays that aren’t very good. And there are very good plays that aren’t successful. Those are the ones we have to stand up for.”
