Category: Publications

“An ideal of theatre I’d never really experienced before or since.” – playwright Jon Robin Baitz on the Padua Festival.

This collection includes: Baby, Jesus! by Murray Mednick, 4-Way Mars by Murray Mednick, Dog Mouth by John Steppling, Wilfredo by Wesley Walker, Times Like These by John O’Keefe, G-Nome by Murray Mednick, Vagrant by Guy Zimmerman, The Wasps by Guy Zimmerman, and The Apple Juice Man by Sarah Koskoff.

Paperback 560pp ISBN 0 – 9630126 – 6 – 5 To be issued in the Winter of 2004

Hipsters in Distress: Are You Lookin? and Other Plays
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Are You Lookin’ and Other Plays Murray Mednick
Padua Playwrights Press

From the Introduction:
Shortly before his own death, the poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote a eulogy for Allen Ginsburg. Milosz praised Ginsburg’s courage, his willingness to live out extremities. “Great poet of the murderous century,” he writes, “who persisting in folly attained wisdom.” These plays by Murray Mednick speak to a similar persistence. They depict characters who lean fully into their own confusion, in search of transformation, and they embrace the seemingly foolish idea that theatre, like poetry or music, is first and foremost an art form, able to elevate those it engages. Playwrights coming of age in this new era of threat and dread will find these plays highly relevant, and this bodes well for their fate in the long term; what artists of the future find useful is what survives.

To call the protagonists of these plays “hipsters” is to link them to the American urban counterculture of the late 1950s. One way or another, Mickey of Are You Lookin?, Peter of Heads, Matt of Scar and the rest are fugitives from the era of Ginsburg and Burroughs, Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, the pre-hippie era when cool was equal parts Eros and Thanatos. Their “distress” comes from a deep connection to states of anxiety, intense longing and regret that afflict and harry the soul. Seeking to liberate themselves from habitual stupidity, these characters tap into an awareness that assaults and disorients them. This awareness has an implacable quality, rendering their voices cruel or plaintive depending on whether they embody it, or serve as its object.

“A playwrights’s playwright Mednick has spent his career at the forefront of avant-garde theater.” – Sandra Ross, LA Weekly

This collection includes Are You Lookin’, Scar, Heads, Skinwalkers and Dictator.

Padua: Plays from the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, 1991-1995 Foreword by John Steppling

The Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, renowned as a stronghold of fiercely intelligent, contemporary theatre, ran from 1978 through 1995 in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains near Los Angeles, attracting theatrical talents such as Sam Shepard, Jon Robin Baitz, Maria Irene Fornes, John Steppling, and David Henry Hwang. With roots deep in the Off-off Broadway theatre of the 1960s and 1970s, Padua offered true word-based theatre, a heady mix of street dialog informed by the Classics, from the Greeks to Beckett and beyond.

Resurrected in 2001 under the artistic direction of Guy Zimmerman, Padua is at last able to offer in book form ten superb plays chosen from the final years of the festival, 1991 through 1995. Included in the anthology:

Neena Beber – Failure to Thrive Maria Irene Fornes – Terra Incognita Joe Goodrich – Steak Knife Bacchae Murray Mednick – Freeze Marlane Meyer – The Chemistry of Change Susan Mosakowski – The Tight Fit John O’Keefe – Disgrace John Steppling – Understanding the Dead Kelly Stuart – Demonology

400 pages Paperback 0 – 963012 6 – 4 – 9 $18.95

This anthology presents the most recent work of Padua’s founder, Murray Mednick. All three plays were produced in Los Angeles in 2001; Mrs. Feuerstein was produced at New York’s Chashama theater in November 2001, and Joe and Betty at the Jose Quintero Theatre in New York in May 2002. Joe & Betty re-opened in New York in October 2002.

Joe & Betty brings us into the darkly comic world of an impoverished, disintegrating family in the Catskills of the 1950s.

16 Routines takes us on a surreal comic journey into the panicked mind of an actor who has forgotten his lines.

Mrs. Feuerstein explores themes of revenge and redemption as a possibly unhinged Holocaust survivor devises her revenge on a German couple by writing them into her play.

From the Introduction:

More than any contemporary playwright, Murray Mednick has made the present moment his artistic terrain. As I noted in the introduction to his Three Plays, Murray’s plays are vehicles designed to deliver us collectively into the present, and to help us make sense of the journey there and back. They speak to a part of us that is unconditioned and radically free, and in so doing help to reconcile us to our own mortality.

From Shakespeare to Brecht, most good playwrights have been poets, and the plays collected in this volume illustrate why this should be so. Even while modern dialogue has progressively sought the condition of every day speech, good playwrights remain fiercely interested in the subtle nuances of the spoken line. Today, as always, the power of a piece of dramatic writing depends on how skillfully the playwright has been able to knit the spoken word to a stillness and silence that reside beneath language. The sign of this covert musicality is the sense we get, while hearing a play by Murray, say, or by Maria Irene Fornes (or by the many playwrights Murray has mentored), that each line is bootstrapping itself into existance, creating anew the various aspects of character and situation that make up the world of the play. The play’s claim on reality, in other words, is re-created line by line, and the fact that there is no assurance of continuity means that surprise and revelation are always present.

Murray’s essentially poetic approach to theatre-making involves the audience in creative work. It demands that we hold in mind two things simultaneously; each moment as literary and theatrical artifact, and each moment as something with a lurid existance all its own. The kinetic interplay of the illusory and the real becomes itself the spectacle Murray asks us to witness, even as we participate in its generation. The world conjoured in this way is illusory on the one hand…and also every bit as real as the world we inhabit outside the theatre. Consciousness itself, the aesthetic suggests, is conjoured moment by moment out of a complex weave of sense impressions, emotional material, mixed in with something finer and more authentic. Contact with this more real aspect of our being is what generates the intense and vertiginous emotional states that afflict Murray’s characters. And this is where the awe, pity and terror associated with Classical tragedy and catharsis enter the picture. The great actors who gravitate to Murray’s work, actors like Ed Harris, Norbert Weisser, Lynnda Ferguson, John Diehl and Annabelle Gerwitz (to name just a few), understand directly how to jump on the magic carpet of Murray’s dialogue to take the invigorating ride toward the real.

Guy Zimmerman – Artistic Director

THE AUTHORS Brooklyn-born Murray Mednick founded the Padua Hills Playwrights workshop/Festival (now Padua Playwrights) in 1978. He was for many years a playwright-in-residence at New York’s Theatre Genesis, where he was artistic co-director from 1970 to 1974, when he relocated to California. He received the American Theater Critic’s Association Best New Play Citation for Joe & Betty in 2002. He is the recipient of two Rockefeller Foundation grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an OBIE, and several Bay Area Critics Awards.

Guy Zimmerman is a playwright, director, and the Artistic Director of Padua Playwrights.

300 pages Paperback 0 – 9630126 – 3 – 0 $14.95

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The Coyote Cycle: Seven Plays by Murray Mednick

“It permanently reshaped my vision of what theatre could achieve-ritual, magic, playfulness, and respect for the playwright-actor bond entered my creative vocabulary and have been my resources ever since. in a day when much of the public has come to doubt the power of theatre, Murray Mednick’s Coyote is proof that the best of it can still change lives.”

David Henry Hwang

176 pages Paperback 0 – 9630126 – 1 – 4 $15.95

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Best of the West: Plays from the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, 1991-1995 Foreword by John Steppling

The Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, renowned as a stronghold of fiercely intelligent, contemporary theatre, ran from 1978 through 1995 in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains near Los Angeles, attracting theatrical talents such as Sam Shepard, Jon Robin Baitz, Maria Irene Fornes, John Steppling, and David Henry Hwang. With roots deep in the Off-off Broadway theatre of the 1960s and 1970s, Padua offered true word-based theatre, a heady mix of street dialog informed by the Classics, from the Greeks to Beckett and beyond.

Resurrected in 2001 by founder Murray Mednick, Padua is at last able to offer in book form ten superb plays chosen from the final years of the festival, 1991 through 1995. Included in the anthology:

Neena Beber – Failure to Thrive Maria Irene Fornes – Terra Incognita Joe Goodrich – Steak Knife Bacchae Murray Mednick – Freeze Marlane Meyer – The Chemistry of Change Susan Mosakowski – The Tight Fit John O’Keefe – Disgrace John Steppling – Understanding the Dead Kelly Stuart – Demonology

400 pages Paperback 0 – 963012 6 – 4 – 9 $18.95

Purchase on Amazon