Part 2 of The Gary Plays, an octet written and directed by Murray Mednick. First presented at The Electric Lodge, Spring 2005 with John Diehl, Donald Berman, Dana Weiluns, and Mickey Swenson.
NOTES ON THE PLAY
In Tirade, Gary visits the park where his son was shot, apparently at random. Struggling with murderous rage, he is joined by two “choral” figures, internalized voices that re-enact painful memories and goad him toward a moment of surrender. This moment of honesty does in fact arrive, and in the peace that follows Gary decides to do penance for his pride by carrying his son’s ashes to the sea. In Gary’s Walk he then retrieves Danny’s ashes from the boy’s mother Gloria, and walks them toward the Pacific. Newly destitute, Gary continues the internal debate with his two choral voices, a modern-day Lear wandering the urban wilderness of Los Angeles. His plan for the ashes involves a visit to his second ex-wife, Marcia, and her new husband Vernon, a wealthy commercial actor with a lavish spread in the Palisades. His intentions vis-à-vis these two remain cloaked in darkness, as if the violent, self-pitying impulses he struggled with in Tirade have not been fully exorcized. Along his journey he also encounters various figures mundane and divine, including Antonio, a Latino angel of death.
Guy Zimmerman – Artistic Director
“A staging of The Gary Plays, the first three works in a tetrology by Murray Mednick, is one of the most engaging and ambitious local theater events of the past few seasons…. Mednick’s Gary is a sort of L.A. Leopold Bloom… The Los Angeles River may be a mere trickle compared to the River Liffey, but The Gary Plays surge with a desire to find–in the seemingly mundane wanderings of one man–the very soul of a city.” – James C. Taylor, KCRW Theatre Talk
Written by Murray Mednick, directed by Guy Zimmerman, the Powerhouse Theater, July 2003.
Performed by three actors, G-nome, is a theatrical-ized meditation on heredity – what we inherit from our ancestors, how psychological patterning plays out in the shape(s) our lives take. The play continues Murray’s exploration of dialogue as a form of “spoken music,” which conveys emotional tone directly. At the same time, there is a story-spine in the piece and it concerns an older man, a writer, contemplating the close of life and questioning it’s meaning. He looks back at all the anguish in his early life, anguish he hasn’t fully been able to shake, and he looks at two of his literary heroes, Primo Levi and Paul Celan, both Jewish Holocaust survivors who eventually took their own lives. In the end, the “protagonist” of G-nome comes down on the side of life, and the specific beats of his journey form the body of the play.
A co-production with The Powerhouse Theatre Company, G-Nome opened in July of, 2003. It was directed by Guy Zimmerman and produced by Guy Zimmerman and Daniel Millner, with set by Jeffrey Atherton, lights by Rand Ryan, costumes by Miguel Montoya, original music and sound design by Robert Oriol, and the following cast:
Written by Murray Mednick, directed by Diane Robinson, 2100 Square Foot Theater, May 25-June 23, 2001.
NOTES ON THE PLAY
This fierce, darkly humorous play is about a poor Jewish couple living in the Catskills in 1951. “It’s autobiographical in its essence, but it’s fiction as a literary artifact,” notes Mednick. “It takes place the year my grandmother died that was a big thing for me. The play is composed of crystalized, musical flashbacks to the kind of verbal boxing match that was continuous between my parents. There was a desperate, destructive anxiety and hysteria that had been handed down the cumulative result of generations of impoverishment and persecution that was common among Eastern European Jews at the time and that took its extreme negative form in my parents.”
The action traces the disintegration of the playwright’s impoverished family. Overwhelmed by the harshness of life, “Matinee” Joe Brasman, the father, a part-time projectionist at the local movie house, loses himself in desperate, illicit sex with an underage girl. His wife Betty, a woman deeply scarred by her mother’s cruelty, and utterly unprepared for the rigors of child rearing, struggles ferociously to extricate herself from the trap life has set. Failure for both characters is certain, yet the playwright never allows us to pity them in a facile way.
The play opens full – throttle as Betty shatters the household’s fragile equilibrium by refusing Joe’s sexual advances. At the end of the first act Joe’s mother dies, accelerating the couple’s mutual estrangement and disintegration. In terms of narrative, not much else happens; Joe and Betty isn’t about the characters getting anywhere. Rather, the playwright pulls aside a curtain and holds it open long enough for their presences to fully register, and it’s the fading away of this encounter that produces the cathartic effect. At the close of the play the two lead characters are alone together, waiting for the authorities to arrive. It remains uncertain whether this arrival will take the form of an ambulance for Betty or a police cruiser for Joe.
The play’s secondary characters flesh out this harsh world. For solace, Betty has only her “friend” Dot, a bitter anti-Semite. Dot’s husband Stan, a man even more befuddled than Joe, gets revenge on his emasculating wife by steering the over-sexed Joe toward his step-daughter Arlene. Hilda, the middle-class social worker, schemes with Joe’s mother to make off with one of the children. The most benign presence is Molly Kaplan, the fire-breathing landlady, and some new level of despair is reached when we realize it’s Betty herself, and not Molly, who is keeping the heat turned off.
In many ways, Emile, the 11 – year old child who exists solely off – stage, is the play’s central character. Emile is ever-present, as an off-stage character and as, more crucially, an aspect of the playwright himself. He is not only the traumatized child referred to by the adults in the play, the boy who steals and gets in fights, Emile is also the playwright of refined sensibility who has authored the intricate text unfolding on stage. By the close of the play the child Emile has stopped talking, and yet on another level every word of the play is being “spoken” by Emile, as Murray Mednick. Without fanfare, big ideas are being coaxed onto the stage. By the action of what force, we are forced to wonder, was this play written? Are we talking about “grace” here? Or the random workings of a mechanistic Fate? Or perhaps only Betty’s tough, defiant genes? When Betty says “Some people have all the luck,” after all, she’s not just making conversation. Being Jewish, the voice of Job echoes in Betty’s complaints. There is no reasoning with the “God” at work in the play, no appeal to innocence or other incidental attributes of the self. And when Betty, warned about her son’s complete withdrawal, says, “He should be forever grateful. To his mother,” we note that, on a theological level at least, she’s not wrong at all.
Guy Zimmerman – Artistic Director
Joe and Betty opened at 2100 Square Feet Theatre, Los Angeles, on May 26th, 2001. It was directed by Diane Robinson with set by Jeffrey Atherton, lights by Rand Ryan, costumes by Bridget Phillips, original music and sound design by Robert Oriol, and the following cast:
This darkly comedic play is about a disgraced corporate executive and his socialite wife. The couple opens their home to a mysterious young woman, who, it turns out, has old scores to settle. Zimmerman casts a stark light on contemporary American mores, using an intense, language-based approach in which the music of everyday speech plays a larger role than situation or plot.
“The play is about the terror of downward mobility,” explains Zimmerman, “the panic of losing ground. I’m also interested in how it feels to live in an America that is becoming truly authoritarian.”
The Inside Job takes place in a suburban condo whose current tenants, Max and Victoria, are “downwardly mobile.” Max’s career ended abruptly in an Enron-type scandal, and to pay legal bills he was forced to sell their lavish home in the hills. The couple’s fall from grace has been tough on Victoria, such that she hasn’t spoken a word in two months. Max is desperate to redress this problem in time for an important party, where he believes they can get their lives back on track. The play opens as Max arrives home with a young woman named Heidi, whose name was the last word to leave Victoria’s lips. As it turns out, Heidi knows more than Max initially suspects, and what she reveals sheds light on an American landscape in which terror is active and at large.
The Inside Job opened at 2100 Square Feet Theatre, Los Angeles, Ca., in Octorber of 2003. It was directed by the playwright and produced by Daniel Millner, with set by Jeffrey Atherton, lights by Robert Oriol, costumes by Tina Preston, original music and sound design by Robert Oriol, and the following cast:
MAX THORNE Barry Del Sherman
VICTORIA THORNE Jessica Margaret Dean
HEIDI Holly Ramos
NOTES ON THE PLAY
When Guy first gave me a copy of The Inside Job, it disturbed and fascinated me. In the tradition of Padua, the style is stripped down and compressed. First and foremost, it seemed to be about demons and angels on the contemporary American scene. The unraveling of Enron was an obvious catalyst. What I found most compelling about the play was how unrelentingly non-penitent the characters were. What they really wanted was back in the game, no matter how unethical that game may be.
The Inside Job takes place in a suburban condo whose current tenants, Max and Victoria, are “downwardly mobile.” Max’s career ended abruptly in an Enron type scandal, and to pay legal bills he was forced to sell their lavish home in the hills. The couple’s fall from grace has been tough on Victoria, such that she hasn’t spoken a word in two months. Max is desperate to redress this problem in time for an important party, where he believes they can get their lives back on track. The play opens as Max arrives home with a young woman named Heidi, whose name was the last word to leave Victoria’s lips. As it turns out, Heidi knows more than Max initially suspects, and what she reveals sheds light on an American landscape in which terror is active and at large.
Since I first read the play eight months ago, two other great unravelings have increased the play’s power and poignancy. One is George Bush’s war in Iraq; the second is Gray Davis’ recall in California, which many view as having been set in motion by Texan power companies. Along with Enron, these social crises are statements about the condition of the American psyche at the beginning of the 21st Century – what Guy has called the “Tex-ification” of the American mind. This is the true subject of the play. Combining influences such as Pinter, Carol Churchill and Thomas Bernhard, The Inside Job puts pressure on the theatrical form to see what it can reveal about life as it is being lived here and now.
Written and directed by Wesley Walker, 2100 Square Feet Theater, May 4-June 8, 2002.
Third in a triptych of Boschian portraits of So Cal life (after “Freak Storm” and “The Conception”) “Wilfredo” displays Walkers characteristic generosity in the face of the human grotesque. We laugh while watching his plays because we recognize ourselves in his distorted but inherently cheerful characters. The sophistication of Wes’ stage craft amplifies the effectiveness of his assault on the physical body – our being at its most vulnerable. Among other things, his background in music has given Wes an uncanny feeling for how to energize the theatrical moment. His basic strategy is one of sensory overload; the imagistic blitz of the dialogue and the direction are aimed at disarming our psychic defenses. It’s an approach that links Wes’ work to that of the “post-modernist” playwrights such as Len Jenkin, Richard Foreman and Mac Wellman, but to my mind anyway, Walker demands much more from himself line by line and on a thematic level as well. Here, his concerns include those of classic tragedy – the undoing of Wilfred, the king and patriarch, lynchpin of meaning in this small kingdom South of the border. The connection between fraternal rivalry and sacrifice are major concerns as well. On a literary level the play evokes Juan Rulfo’s classic Pedro Paramo (which concerns a journey to Comala, Wilfred’s hometown), the “local” characters enlivened by their closeness to vivid Pre-Colombian myth…and to its Christian counterpart.
Overall, the startling impact of Wes’ writing comes from the immediacy of his process – his willingness to be surprised in the act of writing and his penchant for recognizing valuable material within uncomfortable impulses. This surrender to that-which-is-hidden unites his work with that Mednick, Fornes and Steppling, though the effects of Wes’ plays are so utterly original as to make the Padua connection, in some ways, a surprise. Finally, as with Steppling and Kelly Stuart, Wes Walker proves that Los Angeles remains a nurturing ground for vital new voices in American drama, voices to be prized by all those who value the inherently mysterious phenomenon called theatre.
Guy Zimmerman – Artistic Director
With John Horn, Christine Marine Burke, George Gerdes, O-Lan Jones, Jack Kehler, Barry Del Sherman.
Original Music and Music Reconstructions: Robert Oriol
Set Design: Jeffrey Atherton
Costume Design: Bridget Phillips
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Mythology, Banal Reality Mix in a Bueno ‘Wilfredo’
“I’M HAPPY I UNDERSTAND SO LITTLE–I WISH I UNDERSTOOD LESS,” declares an amiable cuckold in Wesley Walker’s “Wilfredo” from Padua Playwrights Productions. He’s come to the right place. Conventional expectations of theatrical meaning and content are a liability in writer/director Walker’s surreal collision of banal Southern California existence with the fluid boundaries of ancient mythology and the dream world. Set in a highly stylized Tijuana saloon, Wesley’s fertile imagination weaves a hauntingly beautiful and at the same time ominous series of elliptical encounters between people who act out of unfiltered impulses rather than socially dictated norms. The barkeep Wilfredo (John Horn), sets the tone with his obsessive insistence on not being addressed by anything other than his proper name. With perfect dry timing, he catalogs his unacceptable nicknames and the reasons why–as if reality can only be defined by what it is not. What matters most to Wilfredo is his “bueno”–his life force, embodied in a pair of coins he’s stolen from the clueless cuckold Nester (Barry Del Sherman), the antithesis of his all-wise Homeric predecessor, Nestor. While at bottom this is a simple boy-meets-bueno, boy-loses-bueno, boy-recovers-bueno story, forsaking the mundane world of cause and effect for the unconscious leaves an expansive canvas to play with. It’s also a frustrating one to try to parse for literal sense. The best way to appreciate this work is to let it wash over you, and let its message emerge from the often poetic repetition of phrases and themes. The effort is rewarded, thanks to exceptional performances that wring intriguing characters out of Walker’s opaque slates. As a pair of American visitors who oscillate between control and helplessness, George Gerdes and Jack Kehler dissect shallow L.A. values as they lurch about in the throes of conflicts that harken uneasily back to Oedipus. Both are attracted like moths to the pretty barmaid Roberta (Christine Marie Burke), an enigmatic, absent-minded muse with overtones of Medea. O-Lan Jones is an earthy presence as Nester’s wife. Walker’s evocative staging makes brilliant use of music by Robert Oriol–some of the images linger like dream fragments long after we’ve returned to more familiar landscapes.
Written and directed by John Steppling, The Evidence Room, January 12 through February 17, 2002.
In 1999, John e-mailed from Paris to tell me he’d started writing a new play. I received Dog Mouth a couple of weeks later, pretty much in its current form. From the first lines I sensed the influence of, dare I say it, Shakespeare. John’s characters were thinking out loud a little more than they used to and, having helped him stage versions of Macbeth and the Tempest a few years earlier, Shakespeare seemed a good explanation. At the same time, there were, of course, other, more familiar echoes — Samuel Beckett and Blind Willie McTell … Melville, Parmenides and Eddie Bunker …
His interest piqued by lurid news accounts of a gang of rail-riding criminal hobos, John takes as his subject the mythic construct of the American West, which he both dismantles and extends. The reigning deity of this landscape is the locomotive. Seductive and powerful, this off-stage presence embodies the iron laws of fate, and also the horizontal nature of America’s mastery over the earth. To counter its inexorable forward-ing impulse, the playwright invokes the vastness of the Western sky, a symbol of freedom and absolute potential. Meanwhile, from off to the side, we hear the harsh music of fighting dogs — survival in this world remains a savage affair.
Confronted with the scope and mastery of John’s recent work, one is forced to ask how Dog Mouth could be his first main stage production in nearly ten years. What taboos does his writing break? Well, first of all, John’s characters inhabit a world in which bourgeois values simply do not exist. The idea that this is even possible is deeply threatening to the guardians of middle-class morality, more so than any explicit critique could ever be. Secondly, and this is where he most resembles Murray Mednick, John’s plays are drenched in an awareness of mortality – drenched, that is, in the unhappy knowledge that we are beings who will inevitably die. The anguish of this awareness is everywhere in Dog Mouth. In the lush rhythms of the dialogue, it pours off the stage. For a culture increasingly devoted to a denial of mortality, this feature of John’s work is utterly unwelcome. Intimidated by the realities of birth and death, we prefer to retreat into the superficialities of our consumer paradise, as if superficiality itself might somehow save us. Dog Mouth (and Weeks as well) is a tragic hero – an “aristocrat of being” – if only because he refuses to participate in this demeaning charade.
Like Murray Mednick, John’s response to the cultural shift that happened in the early 90s – a time when the basic premises of artistic activity were suddenly called into question – was to dig deep. The lyrical realism of the Steppling style has never been more full-blooded, more haunted and evocative, than in this beautiful play.
Guy Zimmerman – Artistic Director
With Steve Davies, Jim Storm, Nia Gwynne and Hugh Dane. Set by Jason Adam, lights by Rand Ryan.
Reviews
Fans of John Steppling won’t be disappointed with “Dog Mouth,” the latest work from a playwright whose bite is as impressively bleak as his bark. Others might not be so generous. With Steppling, you always get what you pay for, and with “Dog Mouth,” which he also directs, the price is particularly steep.
Steppling returns to the L.A. stage community from which he sprang, after an absence of nearly 10 years, with a fresh supply of his favorite ammunition — alienation.
For some playwrights, alienation is merely a pose or a way to gripe without paying your dues as an artist. For Steppling and his marginalized loners, drifters and dreamers, the alienation runs so deep that it becomes the unspoken premise behind every failed transaction and disaffected decision they make.
In “Dog Mouth,” playing through Feb. 17 at Evidence Room in Los Angeles, Steppling has found a setting and story equal to his outlook. Jason Adams’ set is a sweeping desert vista bisected diagonally by a spike of railroad track stretching from the audience into the barren distance. Karl Lundeberg’s haunting sound design is filled with echoes of rattling freight cars, steaming locomotives, plaintive train whistles and the rhythmic clickity-clack of endless journeys to the interior of nowhere. We are in that special space where the alienated spirit flourishes like a cactus baking in the noonday sun.
The play centers on Dog Mouth (Stephen Davies), a rail-riding hobo with a pitiless disposition. Davies imbues the character with the look of a man who has swallowed dynamite and is about to spit out an explosion. The intensity of his performance helps a play that has very little plot. Dog Mouth appears to be the leader of a loose-knit group of criminal hoboes, though what their crimes are remains a mystery — one among many. We get only the sketchiest details about Dog Mouth’s past and what has brought him, at age 55, to his present circumstances, but the fact that he and another hobo, Becker (James Storm), are Vietnam vets offers a clue.
There’s also an outcast young woman, Nyah (Nia Gwynne), who is carrying Dog Mouth’s baby and appears to love him, though he shows little interest in her or the baby.
The play’s fourth character is Weeks, a black dog breeder, well-played by Hugh Dane. The one — and only — matter about which Dog Mouth appears to care is breeding fighting dogs, an activity he once engaged in with some success and intends to do again.
But does he really intend this, and does it matter? Dog Mouth is living in an existential crater carved from his alienation. He has his freedom, an iron will and an inexhaustible supply of contempt to keep himself company. The fact that he also has unbearable hemorrhoids, cancer, an awareness of approaching death and no hope (or even desire) to change any of this seems almost beside the point. This isn’t a person; it’s King Lear, Vladimir, Estragon, Lucky and Job rolled into one.
While there’s a certain fascination in watching a character drawn this extreme and uncompromising, after a while the bleakness begins to curdle. The play seems neither as brave nor as deep as it would like to be, appearing to exist in some strange no man’s land born of Steppling’s ambitious imagination.
In this bitter landscape, alienation rules, but not always believably and with a heavy hand.
Jay Reiner, Hollywood Reporter
A decade ago, if you had asked L.A. theater insiders who was the quintessential L.A. playwright, John Steppling probably would have headed the list.
Steppling’s bleak, elliptical dramas about the underbelly of the Southern California dream had been produced often in small L.A. theaters in the 1980s and early ’90s, winning Steppling a Rockefeller fellowship and awards from the writers’ organization PEN West and the LA Weekly. His work was influential enough that “Stepplingesque” was sometimes used to describe other writers’ plays that seemed to be in a similar vein.
And that vein was pure L.A. Born and reared here, Steppling wrote almost exclusively about his home region, and he was little known outside of it. His only New York production (“Teenage Wedding,” 1991) was either unnoticed or panned by that city’s critics. Steppling appeared to be an only-in-L.A. phenomenon.
Since then, however, Steppling has spread his wings. Although his new “Dog Mouth,” which opened Saturday at Evidence Room, is set in the Southwest, it was written in Paris and first workshopped in London. When he flew to L.A. to stage the play’s premiere, Steppling left behind a temperature of 17 degrees below zero in his new hometown of Krakow, Poland.
Even before he left L.A. “for good” four years ago, Steppling, now 50, had spent much of the preceding two years in Thailand, correcting English texts of Thai journalists for the Bangkok Post-which, he said, “meant guessing what they were trying to say.”
Why did he leave his native turf?
“Such a complex of reasons,” he began, after introducing his 22-year-old Polish wife, Anna Kuros, in Evidence Room lobby on the first day of rehearsals. Steppling looks much as he did when he lived here, with an intricate tattoo covering his left arm, a couple of rings in an ear and a rakish goatee.
Before he left L.A., Steppling had been supporting himself by writing for Hollywood (his favorite credit was “Animal Factory,” a 2000 film directed by Steve Buscemi). But it was work that he found “less and less satisfying. I was being offered teen movies, reactionary crime stories, and I wasn’t making enough money to justify doing what I didn’t like.”
He was also tired of seeing his plays produced only in small L.A. theaters. Any money that he made from them was “incredibly modest,” he said. “Half the time I ended up putting my own money into them.”
Two of his ’80s productions, “The Thrill” and “The Dream Coast,” were under the auspices of the Mark Taper Forum-but at the 99-seat Taper, Too, not the main stage. “I’ve known (Taper artistic director) Gordon Davidson for 20 years. I guess if he was going to put me on the main stage, he probably would have,” Steppling said, at the same time admitting that he wouldn’t want to be “a court eunuch who writes the kind of plays that make Gordon Davidson happy.” American theater, he said, “is at a place where not much good stuff gets done, certainly not in the big institutional theaters.”
He also felt a wider disaffection with American culture, which he believes “does not trust art very much. It’s thought of as another way to anesthetize or distract yourself or as therapy. Quality has been confused with popularity. Art should help awaken you, not numb you.”
In all, he said, “I started to understand the impulse for artists to leave where they’re from. You have a personal history that becomes burdensome. And that adversarial relationship that artists should have with their society sometimes is easier to manage from farther away.”
Steppling first chose Paris because of friends there. After a year, during which he wrote “Dog Mouth,” he applied for jobs teaching English in several countries and finally accepted one in Kielce, Poland. “Going to Poland to teach in Kielce,” he said wryly, “is like saying you’re going to California to teach in Susanville or Red Bluff.”
Steppling met his wife in Kielce, but after eight months there, they moved to London, where he knew an agent and several producers. He had received an offer to do a screenplay adaptation. That movie went nowhere, he said, but he did get a job as a story editor on a BBC cartoon called “Popetown”-“like ‘South Park’ meets the Vatican,” he said. “I deeply suspect it’ll never get on the air.”
A workshop production of “Dog Mouth” took place in London. But the city was impossibly expensive, he said, and while he was working to pay the bills, “there wasn’t enough time to do theater.” After a year, the couple returned to Poland, where costs were lower. Kuros began university studies in Japanese in Krakow, and Steppling returned to teaching English-which allowed more time to write plays than did “the hysteria and hustle of the film industry.”
Krakow, he said, is home for the near future, although he acknowledged it’s not a perfect fit. “I’ve always hated cold weather,” he said. “I’m a wimpy Californian. The irony is not lost on me.”
Although Steppling’s mother, Hildegarde Bielinski, was the daughter of immigrants from Poland, Steppling spoke no Polish before moving there. But he’s learning the language, and he reports that most Poles younger than 25 speak English, which is replacing Russian as the second language.
In fact, he said, with the incursion of U.S. chain stores and fast food, satellite dishes and e-mail, “I sometimes feel like I’m in a very far and very cold suburb of Los Angeles.”
One with an invigorating theater scene, he said. “Theater is a serious art form there, so people go to it with serious intent. There’s a level of respect I don’t find very often here.” He mentions the city’s long-established Teatr STU, whose leader, Krzysztof Jasinski, recently staged an “extraordinary ‘Hamlet’ that featured a horde of real, trained rats running across the stage, stopping at the apron and then running down a hole.”
It sounds, well, Stepplingesque.
The title character in “Dog Mouth” is the leader of a criminal gang of hobos who has recently impregnated a young woman less than half his age. He’s also a former trainer of fighting dogs, and “he has a longing for that part of his life in which he was esteemed for his excellence in breeding dogs. His reputation now is based on fear.” The play was inspired by a newspaper article and a late-night tabloid TV documentary about a real-life homeless criminal.
Steppling acknowledged that the relationships between older men and younger women in his plays and the glimpses of the world of dog training-which was explored in greater detail in his “Standard of the Breed”-are themes that resonate in his life; indeed, “I’m willing to accept that everything I write is autobiographical on some level,” he said.
When he lived in L.A., he raised Neapolitan mastiffs. Asked if he had ever bred dogs for fighting, which is illegal, he replied: “I think I’ll refrain from answering that. Let’s just say, ‘I didn’t.'” He gave up his last dog, a German shepherd, when he left L.A.
One of the characters in “Dog Mouth,” a lieutenant in the hobo gang who is sent by Dog Mouth to do an unsavory deed, is played by Steppling’s cousin Jim Storm. Steppling credits him as “the first person who mentioned theater to me.” When Steppling was passing through New York in 1971, he visited Storm, who was involved in the off-off-Broadway scene. (Recalling those times, Storm said Steppling “passed out on my floor and didn’t leave for months.”)
While “Dog Mouth” isn’t an L.A. play-the first half is set somewhere in the Mojave Desert; the second half takes place near Phoenix-it’s in the tradition of Steppling’s other plays in that it’s very Western, the playwright said. “A truth of American culture can be found in the western expansion and the nature of the people who came here. When I was a kid in Hollywood, all of our neighbors talked about who had just come out from where.”
“Dog Mouth” is not designed to placate anyone who has found Steppling’s previous work too dark. “I’m amazed when people say, ‘Your plays are so depressing,'” he said. “Just turn on the news, and see the carnage and suffering.”
Steppling returned to L.A. for a workshop of “Dog Mouth” in December 2000, part of the Taper’s New Work Festival. He and Taper producing director Robert Egan co-directed “Dog Mouth” there. Steppling said he enjoyed the use of the Taper’s support network, and he thinks Egan is “a great critic and an astute analyst who made some essential suggestions.”
However, he doesn’t want to participate in any more Taper New Work Festivals. He said Egan could have made the same suggestions from simply reading the play-and in fact “has been helpful on plays that weren’t part of the New Work Festival.”
As for the festival itself, “it’s a small bone tossed from the master’s table,” he said. “And I’ve seen too many plays ruined by development, where the original had energy and integrity, but the corners get rounded off. A play by committee is not a good idea. There is enough collaboration in the rehearsal process anyway.”
Audiences saw the Taper workshops, and “once there is an audience, it’s a performance, but one that’s not entirely prepared,” Steppling said. “There’s never quite enough time. It’s frustrating, and for me it’s a dead end and a waste of time. I know they’re not going to put me on the main stage.”
Egan responded that he believes the workshop helped “unearth” the play. He added that the festival was not a dead end, for the play is now being co-produced at Evidence Room and Padua Playwrights Productions-descendant of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, where Steppling began writing plays in the late 1970s.
Furthermore, Egan said, “John’s plays are very intimate. I wouldn’t want to see them get swallowed or damaged by an 800-seat venue like the Taper.”
“Insulting nonsense,” said Steppling, when told of that last remark. “That’s just a way of justifying the fact that they don’t produce writers like me.”
Despite their disagreements, Egan said, “you’ve got to admire John’s commitment to his own voice. He’s not altering or bastardizing it to suit some producer.” Egan called “Dog Mouth” “vintage Steppling in terms of the form and style. But in terms of the content, there’s a new maturity, a new level of existential introspection that can come only with age.”
Steppling, on the other hand, said his themes remain the same. But he believes the formal elements of his writing are entering a different phase. “It has to do maybe with streamlining the metaphysics and the emotions. It feels like I’ve zeroed in on the germane tensions, that the palette has narrowed and intensified.”
Steppling has a bottom line on what he hopes to accomplish with “Dog Mouth” or any play. “Whether the ending is happy or sad, confusing or poetic, or it just stops with no ending, you should leave the theater haunted by that experience.”
Don Shirley, Los Angeles Times
About 15 years ago, when he was turning 35, John Steppling was being touted by the local press as Los Angeles’ most important homegrown playwright. Richard Stayton, writing for the Herald Examiner, went so far as to dub Steppling L.A.’s only playwright — a reductive assessment, but also an indication both of the media’s hunger to have a theater scribe to call its own, and of the excitement among L.A.’s underground literati over Steppling’s uniquely terse, dank vision.
“Bud, you wanna cup a coffee, Bud?” a young woman says to a man waxing his surfboard in The Shaper, among Steppling’s earliest plays. She drones on in this vein, sometimes shifting the sequence of key words, until the man looks up and stares at her blankly. Blackout. Meanwhile, for the transitions between such scenes in The Shaper’s premiere production (directed by Steppling in 1985), an electric guitar riffed at deafening volume before abruptly cutting out for the next truncated scene between two human beings, half dead on meth and completely missing each other’s signals.
I hated this bludgeoning production. And yet, almost two decades later, I haven’t forgotten it.
Dog Mouth, Steppling’s first full-length work to be produced here in ten years (for Padua Playwrights Productions and Evidence Room), feels as though it’s populated by The Shaper’s characters — still on meth, still disconnected from everything and everybody around them, still making life-altering plans no more than two hours before acting on them, still dying. Yet, in many ways, Steppling’s people have grown up and found something they want to say, to express in sardonic, reflective speeches as though in a play by Chekhov or Beckett. Most of Dog Mouth’s characters are, like their author, around 50 years old. But while their bodies may be surrendering to time’s ravages, the same is certainly not true of their wit — which, in the case of the title character, Dog Mouth (Stephen Davies), is as feral as his name suggests:
I’ll have to step off the sidewalk for this woman because this new expensive stroller is big, it’s bigger than it needs to be, and it’s big and I step off into the gutter usually, and there are times that as she passes the child will turn its head while seated in the stroller, turn its little head and look at me and then I’ll make a terrible face, the most awful hideous face I know how to make and my tongue will come out and flap at this child and usually it happens that the child will start to cry.
The idea for the play stems from a newspaper story about a declining criminal fraternity of rail-hopping hobos in the Pacific Northwest, the leader of which (here, Dog Mouth) once matched pitbulls and is reputed to have pushed a man to his death from a moving train. And though Dog Mouth, wanted by the law, is now dying of cancer, he is followed, puppylike, by young runaway Nyah (Nia Gwynne), pregnant with his child. Thus, imminent birth and imminent death walk side by side across the play’s brutal, outdoor Mojave Desert landscape. (A pair of train tracks traverses Jason Adams’ open, epochal set, while the actors’ feet audibly scrunch on the sand beneath them.)
The burly repartee between Dog Mouth and his sidekick, Becker (James Storm), briefly turns the play into a latter-day Waiting for Godot of the American West — until, by the end of Act 1, it becomes clear that, rather than waiting for Godot, or God, or nothing at all, Dog Mouth and Becker plan to kill a man named Mueller, a violator of some loyalty code, the details of which are pointedly obscure. Act 2 opens in Phoenix, Arizona, physically suggested by the addition of a rusted oil drum and a roll of steel cable to the set’s desert floor. Dog Mouth has arrived, he says, to buy a dog from an African-American named Weeks (Hugh Dane, who attacks the role with manic glee). Meanwhile, Nyah grows increasingly hysterical at the prospect and potential consequences of Mueller’s assassination. (Even this self-detonating romantic recognizes that this is no way to start nesting.)
The play’s subtext is a series of dogfights among this quartet of characters, a Pinteresque drama of menace (threats, retreats, occasional attacks to the throat and consequent yelping), a roundelay of dominance and submission that’s sordidly entertaining, particularly in the hands of actors who bring so much frenzied energy to their roles. Steppling can thank Davies and Storm, especially, for embodying his distinction between a dog and a pet, between a beast that looks death in the eye and one that eagerly fetches balls. This refers, of course, not just to canines but to a human pool of ferocious independents, versus a mainstream of obsequious servants.
In Dog Mouth, Steppling shines as a poet of the grotesque, condemning — from the desert brush — our media-saturated culture of consumption, and doing it without a hint of stridency. For example, Dog Mouth’s crimes, as well as his liaison with a much younger woman, have led to his being the subject of a TV interview, an event that’s referred to throughout the play. The point? That television, with all its distortions and lies, has nonetheless made Dog Mouth identifiable as somebody, even out in Arizona. Elsewhere, one of Dog Mouth’s speeches calls up the image of a teenager accidentally run over by a train, his head severed and settled — after a bounce or two — staring at his own “brand-new Nikes.” Beyond that, no comment, and none is needed.
Perhaps the most telling evolution since The Shaper is Steppling’s use of music in the scene transitions. Those screaming Hendrix-like bridges have given way to Karl Lundeberg’s original music and sound design, based on an acoustic-guitar motif and accompanied by an ethereal chorus of train whistles that might have been sung by a canopy of angels. The music’s mythic resonance conjoins with the grandiloquent set, a backdrop of three billboard panels creating a photographic scrim of rocky chaparral, against which Rand Ryan’s lights play a chiaroscuro of harsh color and stark, black-and-white relief. All of which works as counterpoint to the perpetually annoyed, canine gruffness of Davies’ Dog Mouth, and to the way Gwynne’s precocious Nyah cowers when Dog Mouth is barking at her. This, with the artistry of Steppling’s careful staging, turns the play into something as majestic and fragile — as beautiful, comical and rare — as a soap bubble.
So tenderly and impossibly fused are the elements holding Dog Mouth together through Act 1, it’s no surprise when the bubble bursts in Act 2. A panicked Becker, returned from his homicidal assignment and dressed like a character in the movie Fargo (leather hunting cap, checkered jacket, mittens), lurches up and down in front of Dog Mouth like a jumping bean while reporting a botched job. This is where, yielding the authority of its delicately balanced vision, the play begins to feel derivative. (Pinter’s The Dumbwaiter, Mamet’s American Buffalo, Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and the collected works of Sam Shepard all spring to mind.) This is neither the actor’s fault (Storm is excellent) nor the play’s. The responsibility lies with Steppling the director, unwilling or unable to guide the bubble away from rough surfaces. The burlesque of Becker’s attire and gestures belongs to a different play.
Yet there are times, even when a production fails to cohere, that the event is still more satisfying than some blander, less ambitious effort (which nonetheless hangs together). Dog Mouth is one such instance. Where a cruder work might have absorbed the tonal shifts, the reasons for this production’s implosion are, paradoxically, a testament to its intricacy. Still, when Dog Mouth sings, as it does for much of the evening, its notes ring true. Maybe that’s the most one can ask of a cultural investigator the likes of Steppling: Please don’t lie to us. His new work may fib ever so slightly toward the end, but for the most part, Steppling is true to his words.
What a pernicious and hollow distraction it is to name a developing playwright the Voice of a city — someone who’s still trying, after all, to accrue the experience and wisdom that will enable him to find a voice. At a post-play discussion of Steppling’s Dream Coast, in 1990 at the Mark Taper Forum, one of the theater’s artistic associates told a disgruntled subscriber that the Taper had chosen to do the play in order to help establish Steppling as a national playwright, a strategy that turned out to be in vain.
Shortly before he left Los Angeles four years ago, Steppling directed two plays that he’d spun out of Shakespeare, Murdered Sleep: Meditations on Macbeth and The Cold White Virgin Snow: The Tempest Reconsidered. Those projects — taut, sparse, yet bathed in fine language — were the first tangible sign of Steppling maturing as a playwright, however dependent on Shakespeare. (There are worse pillars to lean on.)
In Dog Mouth, Steppling returns not as Shakespeare, not as Beckett, but as Steppling, in his smartest, most vulnerable, most honest incarnation so far. When Nyah asks Dog Mouth whether it’s true he’s killed before, as reported in the press, he addresses her question in words that are as much about playwriting as they are about murder:
What do you believe? . . . The answer can only be about what you believe, because people will say anything, people will say things because they are ignorant and know nothing and because their lives are empty and stupid and what people say isn’t worth pissing on. What matters is what you think, the question here is what do you believe, deep in your heart, way down underneath all the bullshit and newspapers and TV and gossip is your heart which is pure and which contains the truth. Tell me, what is in your heart?
Steven Leigh Morris, LA Weekly
It’s been almost a decade since an L.A. theater has produced a new play by John Steppling, once a prominent dramatic voice in the city where he grew up. The author has actually left California, and he wrote this piece, “Dog Mouth,” while living in Paris before moving to — of all places — Poland, where he currently resides. While he has changed locations, the scribe hasn’t changed what he writes about, the dispossessed, down-and-out figures of the American West. He also hasn’t changed his lyrical, elliptical theatrical style, which emerged directly from the alternative theater of the early ’70s, with a heavy dose of Sam Shepard influence. While the work doesn’t feel especially fresh, “Dog Mouth” does emit a raw, performative power that makes it stand out from the staid and standard theater of current times.
This power is never more apparent then when the play’s title character lets loose with a venomous rant or an aggressive philosophical tract, and as a director Steppling deserves credit for finding just the right actor for the role. Stephen Davies embodies Dog Mouth, aka Terry, and he gives a performance that comes from the gut. He’s a hefty, bearded man with a guttural growl, and even when he’s just standing center stage and barely moving, the performance remains a physical one as the words rise up from deep within and emerge with animal force. When, as a former trainer of fighting dogs, the character delivers an elegy to tough canines, it’s clear that he identifies with the creatures. It’s a potent turn from Davies that dominates the stage just as an alpha male should dominate his pack.
Dog Mouth is a hobo who may or may not be the head of an expansive criminal organization of fellow hoboes. Even his young companion, Nyah (Nia Gwynne), who’s pregnant with his baby, isn’t sure whether the rumors of his murderous past are myth, reality or a mixture of both. The police certainly believe that he’s dangerous, as does the press, and Dog Mouth has given a recent interview to a TV reporter that has increased his reputation and also put him on extra alert as far as cops are concerned. No matter what, we at least know that, as his pal Becker (James Storm) says, “He’s not what you’d call a good man.”
Steppling has never been a narrative writer, and “Dog Mouth” actually has more story than much of his earlier work. Putting together what’s happening is easy enough, but deeper motives remain purposefully elusive. Becker, always willing to do Dog Mouth’s bidding, goes off to “take care of” a nemesis named Mueller. Meanwhile, Dog Mouth considers a return to training dogs, tries to convince the naive Nyah that he really has no intention of raising a child and takes her to Phoenix, where he meets with an associate of Mueller’s named Weeks (Hugh Dane), all the while speechifying about life and survival. And dogs.
There’s certainly depth to the work, and Steppling does reveal some facts about Dog Mouth that can be seen as a kind of climax. But in terms of traditional structure, the piece is anti-climactic and seems to stop rather than end, partially because the central character cedes the stage to others for the final scenes.
Steppling is an uncompromising writer, unwilling to give in to predictable storytelling structure or easy answers, and there’s certainly something admirable about that even though it keeps the work feeling a bit stunted. Shepard built upon his early experimental works to craft the lasting and fully realized “Buried Child.” Steppling seems satisfied with his form for now, crafting differing riffs — with a slow, very deliberate beat — on familiar melodies that we first heard decades ago.
Fortunately, he’s supported in “Dog Mouth” by excellent design work. Jason Adams’ set consists of a railroad track angled across the stage, surrounded on three sides by panels depicting the rocky in-the-middle-of-nowhere emptiness of the desert. Rand Ryan’s lighting evokes nighttime very effectively, and Ames Ingham’s costumes are filled with clever details, such as the slit in the side of Becker’s pants where the pocket should be, and Dog Mouth’s shred of a belt.
In addition to Davies, the other actors have opportunities to shine. Storm, Steppling’s cousin and a veteran of his work, delivers a juicy monologue in the second act that he partially pantomimes in blatantly comic fashion. Dane possesses a commanding presence that reveals a gentleness somewhere beneath the surface, while Gwynne makes a convincing girl about to wake up to reality. It’s ultimately the acting more than the play that gives “Dog Mouth” some immediacy.
Steven Oxman, Variety
“Mankind: just a giant lukewarm casserole waiting to be tossed into a trash bag.” Playwright John Steppling is not exactly what you’d call an optimist. Yet his uncanny knack for combining flippancy and fatalism allows him to establish a tone that is as funny as it is disturbing. After a four-year absence from L.A., Steppling is back in town with a new stable of rambling, strung-out outcasts who grope about the fringes of society, who have accepted meaninglessness and await their lives’ end. Here he turns his attention to a Mafia-like group of hobos, ex-Vietnam vets, “all men who carry nothing with them.” Their obsession with dog fighting functions as a clear metaphor for the banal brutality that characterizes their lives.
With the world premiere of Dog Mouth–jointly produced by Padua Playwrights Productions and the Evidence Room–Steppling succeeds as director as well, guiding this dynamite ensemble toward pacing that is nothing short of brilliant. Steppling’s script veers and swerves suddenly–from brutality to humor to pathos and back again–and this ensemble displays an adroitness with the material that is invigorating.
Stephen Davies is Dog Mouth, the dominating, amoral head of this band of hobos–reminiscing, casually planning a murder, attempting to dismiss his much younger, now pregnant lover. Davies’ performance is appropriately large. There are sublime moments when he artfully expresses the incantatory music in his speeches, his raspy bass voice building beautifully toward an emotional climax so that he becomes a preacher of sorts.
As Becker, Dog Mouth’s bumbling friend he uses as an assassin, James Storm proves mesmerizing in his range, detail, and complete focus. He completely resists any impulse to condescend toward his character, instead infusing Becker with a hidden volatility and fleeting tenderness. As Nyah, Dog Mouth’s young lover, Nia Gwynne exudes a desperate, searching love for Dog Mouth that is touching. Yet Gwynne’s performance can occasionally grow cloying in her attempts to make Nyah seem young and naive. There are moments when we even wonder if Nyah might not be somewhat mentally disabled. Hugh Dane is Weeks, a dog breeder and associate of Dog Mouth. Dane has the kind of booming, rich voice and authoritative aura that makes Steppling’s words ring with sonority.
Jason Adams’ stunning set consists of a backdrop of billboard-sized photos of the open desert and a sand-covered stage bisected by a train track, lined with broken glass. Rand Ryan’s expressive lighting artfully manipulates the moods of this barren locale, using spotlights to cast the characters’ shadows onto the vacant landscape. Each scene is punctuated by Karl Lundeberg’s well-imagined soundscape of train noise and music, voices of offstage characters, motors. The combined effect is simply haunting.
Written and directed by John O’Keefe, 2100 Square Feet Theatre in October of 2002. The play takes place in Hitler’s Berlin between 1934 and 1938 and concerns Meta Wolff, Germany’s most famous actress, who is banned from the stage because she is a Jew. She attacks the only way she can: through her actor-husband, Oskar Weiss, whom she directs behind the scenes in a production of “Hamlet” to boldly satirize the Nazi regime. With Norbert Weisser and Laurie O Brien Lights by Rand Ryan, costumes by Bridget Phillips, original music and sound design by O-Lan Jones.
Those of us who work in theatre are used to hearing the art form disparaged as lumbering and archaic, a cultural dinosaur. Typically, we tend to concede the point, if only to move the conversation along to more pleasant topics. A play like John O’Keefe’s masterful Times Like These puts a stop to all that. The play is eminently relevant to anyone currently breathing air, and what it has to say could only be said by actors on a stage. Americans, certainly, should celebrate O’Keefe for how he illuminates the subversive connections between theatricality and totalitarian politics. Those charmed by George Bush and his folksy rancher act, for example, should pay close attention to O’Keefe’s depiction of the slowly encroaching darkness that enveloped German in the 1930s.
Standing should-to-shoulder with Mednick, Fornes and Steppling as one of the defining voices of the Padua Hills Festival, O’Keefe is a “man of the theatre” in the fullest sense of the term. Taking as its subject the leading lights of the Berlin stage during the 1930s, Times Like These is based on hard historical research (see the program insert.) But the playwright’s command of his medium shows in the substance of Times Like These as well as its subject matter. From the point of view of power, the play suggests, theatre is always seditious, underscoring as it does the illusory nature of appearances generally, and of social identity in particular. Here, as in George Orwell’s 1984, the playwright contrasts the naked power of the State on the one hand, with romantic love on the other. Love seeks to be only what it already is, whereas political might is defined by a desperate need to become something else. Naked aggression never wants to see itself when it looks into the mirror; those who sell us down the river expect to be flattered while they do so.
Guy Zimmerman – Artistic Director
The characters of Oskar Weiss and Meta Wolff are loosely based on the story of Joachim Gottschalk, one of Germany’s most popular film actors who was increasingly ostracized because his wife was Jewish. “I decided to skew the facts to form a story,” explains O’Keefe. “I made Meta the talented one. That worked for me because she’s a Jew, she’s not even allowed to enter the theater. I wanted to discover what it was like to experience the shrinking of civil rights, which is a concern a lot of us have today.”
Times Like These is the second in a triptych of plays that also includes “Glamour,” about Laura Riding and Robert Graves, and a work-in-progress tentatively titled “Goering and the Texan.”
Times Like These takes place in Hitler’s Berlin between 1934 and 1938 and concerns Meta Wolff, Germany’s most famous actress, who is banned from the stage because she is a Jew. She attacks the only way she can: through her actor-husband, Oskar Weiss, whom she directs behind the scenes in a production of “Hamlet” to boldly satirize the Nazi regime.
The characters of Oskar Weiss and Meta Wolff are loosely based on the story of Joachim Gottschalk, one of Germany’s most popular film actors who was increasingly ostracized because his wife was Jewish. “I decided to skew the facts to form a story,” explains O’Keefe. “I made Meta the talented one. That worked for me because she’s a Jew, she’s not even allowed to enter the theater. I wanted to discover what it was like to experience the shrinking of civil rights, which is a concern a lot of us have today.”
Times Like These is the second in a triptych of plays that also includes “Glamour,” about Laura Riding and Robert Graves, and a work-in-progress tentatively titled “Goering and the Texan.”
Written by Murray Mednick, directed by Roxanne Rogers
Set in the 1960’s, Mrs. Feuerstein, a creative writing teacher at a private school, confronts the painful legacy of the Holocaust. Vulnerable and on the verge of a psychotic break, she becomes obsessed with the idea of revenge, and writes a play where she imagines herself in an unusual relationship with a German couple. Ideas of revenge and expiation manifest into an unusual sexual attraction, as the underdog seeks the role of tormentor and the oppressor seeks forgiveness. Mrs. Feuerstein is a beautiful story about a vulnerable woman dealing with her past.
Mednick was inspired by a (description) photograph of a glamorous German couple he came across in the book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.” The photo (image) of Frieda Wohl eating finger sandwiches and sipping champagne while watching her husband Max, a member of an SS execution squad stationed in Poland, butcher 50 Jewish men in a town square, set Mednick thinking about the notion of revenge. “I set out to explore, who do you take revenge on, especially now? Who do you kill?”
“I’m trying to deal with the incomprehensibilty of the Holocaust, the difficulty of assimilating the truth,” he said in a Los Angeles Times interview. “The whole idea of history doesn’t mean anything if such a thing can happen.” “It’s an allegory of the eros of revenge and expiation,” Mednick explains. “Frieda longs for expiation, and Mrs. Feuerstein longs for revenge. When the two meet, it’s like an erotic thing. They are drawn to one another.”
Mrs. Feuerstein was first presented at 2100 Square Feet Theatre, Los Angeles, Ca., on July 28th, 2001. It was directed by Roxanne Rogers with set by Jeffrey Atherton, lights by Rand Ryan, costumes by Bridget Phillips, original music and sound design by O-Lan Jones, and the following cast:
ADELE FEUERSTEIN Maria O’Brien MAX WOHL Christopher Allport FREIDA WOHL Lynnda Ferguson DR. SAMUELSON Louis R. Plante DR. BAUM Drago Sumonja JANE Gwendolyn Yeo
NOTES ON THE PLAY
I recall hearing fragments of Mrs. Feuerstein during a master class Murray conducted in his home in 1996, when he would read (as we all did) from his work-in-progress. Today I hear echoes of that time throughout the play. Living in West LA, Murray was teaching part time at ShelHevet, a modern Orthodox Jewish high school. He and his wife Christina had just returned from China with Celene, the beautiful baby girl they had adopted there. The Padua Festival the previous summer had been held on the well-watered lawns of USC. Despite memorable productions, the thunder of football pads and the constant din of helicopters and sirens, had rendered the Padua spirit even more fugitive than usual. Few of us expected more festivals in the future. Over the ten weeks of his workshop, it became clear that Murray was looking back over a long and celebrated career and asking again: “Why write plays?” For answers, we interrogated the usual suspects: Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Ibsen and Beckett. I suspect Hamlet was among the plays we read – its themes of revenge and doubt appear throughout Mrs. Feuerstein.
Also that year Murray read Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” which threw a harsh new light on the vicious anti-Semitism of ordinary Germans, and their complicity in Nazi crimes. I’ve heard Murray speak of the impact on him when, at age five, he saw the first newsreels out of a defeated Germany – nightmarish images of emaciated men and women shivering beside piles of dead bodies. Murray says he felt an immediate connection to these Jews, and recognized instantly that this horrific event concerned him intimately. Decades later, the Goldhagen book transformed the fear of this recognition into an anger so fierce that it demanded to be actualized in the form of revenge.
And yet, of course, for a Jew the idea of revenge is problematic – even if one could somehow equal the depravity, abject cruelty and sheer scope of the Nazi horror, what about the need to be just? What about the absolute prohibition against murder? In Murray’s view, the opposing demands of revenge and justice must be reconciled on a higher level, namely, on the level of text. It’s easy to miss the magnitude of this idea. For a playwright, text may look and sound a lot like real life, after all. And through Mrs. Feuerstein’s elaborate play-within-a-play structure, Murray has erased the line between audience and text even further. Remember too that from the beginning, the Jews have been a literary people…a people of the text.
Always active in Murray’s work is the notion that the truly big ideas can only be “thought” via theatre. In Mrs Feuerstein, the big idea concerns how the German atrocities forever diminished our ability to mean something. Through the haunted character of Adele Feuerstein, Murray urges us to truly confront this loss, and not from a place of safety or remove. Armored by her anger, we go deeper…to view not a blurred, softened picture, but the actual truth in all its awful specificity. What was done can never be un-done, the play says. What was lost will never return, and this knowledge must be endured. But at the same time Retribution will be taken – Adele Feuerstein is coming from the Jews.
