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If you’ve never seen a Mednick play before,
be aware, it’s complicated,” The Fool and
the Red Queen’s PR warned me as I entered the theater. To some it might be  a slight understatement but it sets the tolerance level high and the pleasant and
mind games this play sets forth actually come off as something you could gladly
deal with.
Indeed the play is not easy. Its strong
focus on the power of language makes concentration a must to properly enjoy the
hard-to-pin-down poetry of both the conversations and the situations. But even the
most unfazed of spectators would be forced to at least a smile by the bouts of
humor that saturate the play. The show, despite its demanding nature, is led by
an immense sense of lightness that seems to be Mednick’s trademark.
The
Fool and the Red Queen premiering at Lounge Theater as part of the Fringe
Festival, is one of a series of eight plays known as “Gary Plays,” which retrace
episodes in the life of Gary Bean, a down-on-his-luck actor. The first play of
the octet was staged in 1997. In The Fool
and the Red Queen, Gary finds himself at a nightmarish audition where the
audience discovers the magical ability of theater to create new realities.
The play is presented by Padua Playwrights
and directed by Guy Zimmerman. It features long-time Padua actors such as Peggy
A. Blow (Mednick’s Girl on a Bed, DaddyO Dies Well), Bill Celentano (Padua’s Clown Show for Bruno, Dell Arte’s Journey of the Ten Moons and Korbel II, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble’s Love Council, Ken Roht’s Echo’s Hammer), John Diehl (Joe and Betty in L.A and N.Y), Jack
Kehler, Gray Palmer (Girl on a Bed, Out of the Blue) and Julia Prud’homme
(Brigitte Bardot in Padua’s Hotel Bardot,
Hermetically Sealed).
Murray Mednick is a man who has been around
and already learned that your best bet for success is to give your all to
please yourself first. The legendary New
York writer at the numerous awards says of himself: “I’m a poet, not a
playwright.” His passion for language leads him to give light to plays developed
and improved upon on the spot, as if inspired by the spoken words. As Zimmerman
explains, “there’s always some place way in the rehearsal process where
something shifts.”
“We
lost it, we were improvising and we lost it”
This sense that Mednick, the
poet-playwright, builds around themes rather than around a pre-defined and well
laid-out plot is reflected in his dialogues, with words that jump off of each
other to create a whole that’s hardly definable other than as an accumulation
of suggestions. His use at his own liking of elements that belong to different
levels of reality (TV screens, room cameras, the play inside the play…) with absolutely
no regard for common sense, also come as a statement; it seems to voice: stop
looking for the plot and enjoy the analogies, metaphors, ellipses, analepsis…
it’s easier than it sounds!
Ultimately though, Mednick’s main direction
is provocation. Through the audience’s discomfort he thrives and with a passion
for language he plays with expectations. Provoking the poetic mind is a mission
he is not willing to compromise; he explains that his plays are “a creative
collaboration between the players and the audience” –the playwright’s request
is echoed by the recurrent complaint of the Red Queen to the Fool: “you’re not
here, you’re not present!”
 If the celebration of the power of poetic
logic sounds like something exciting to you, go see Mednick’s play. It truly is
a delight for the mind.
THE
FOOL AND THE RED QUEEN runs from May 19th to June 24th
@Lounge Theater
6201 Santa Monica Blvd.
Hollywood, CA 90038
For more information call (323) 960-7740 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (323) 960-7740 end_of_the_skype_highlighting or
go to www.plays411.com/RedQueen
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