LA Review: 'The Fool and the Red Queen'

Murray Mednick’s long, productive career as an award-winning poet-playwright, both Off-Broadway and in Los Angeles, his founding of the Padua Playwrights festival, and his service as a mentor and supporter of other writers have made him a revered figure in some theatrical circles. But his works are not always accessible to the ordinary theatergoer, and on that subject, he’s intransigent. “I don’t explain my plays to people who are too stupid to understand them.… I’m a poet, not a playwright,” he told L.A. Stage Times.

Mednick’s current offering consists of two one-acts, the sixth and seventh installments of “The Gary Plays,” his eight-play cycle centered on the character of out-of-work Los Angeles actor Gary Bean. In the first of the current production’s plays, “Gary’s Strange Callback,” Gary (John Diehl) is auditioning for a pair of irascible hipsters, Chauncey (Jack Kehler) and Rondell (Gray Palmer), who tell him they don’t have a finished script, just an idea and some pages they ask him to read. We’re introduced via projected photographs to the Fool (Bill Celentano), and Gary is cast as the Soldier. Then, at the very end, the Queen (Julia Prud’homme) appears abruptly to demand, “Where is my Fool?”

The second piece, “The Fool and the Red Queen,” is the play being cast earlier; it examines the volatile, hostile, mutual dependency of the Queen and her Fool. She’s selfish, arrogant, impulsive, and endlessly demanding, while he’s seething with anger and resentment beneath a self-effacing façade. War is being waged, and the Soldier has performed acts of murder and rape, so the Queen is calling for his execution. Also present is the oracular innkeeper-chorus Don Antonio (Peggy A. Blow), who takes a cynical but loyal view of the Queen.

Mednick and his co-director and longtime collaborator, Guy Zimmerman, have assembled a sextet of accomplished actors, most of them veterans of Mednick productions. The ferocious Queen is compared to Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, and Prud’homme gives her a properly outlandish shape. She is by turns imperious, petulant, and querulous. Celentano’s Fool is the physical embodiment of dejection and defeat, though he can deliver a standing backflip without breaking a sweat. Diehl gives Gary a solid reality beyond what’s hinted at in the script. And Blow seems part shaman, part music-hall comedian, while Kehler and Palmer are sly manipulators with an edge of cruelty. 

Zimmerman describes the play as “existential vaudeville,” but most good vaudevillians would insist on a sharper focus and a less meandering script.

Presented by Padua Playwrights Productions at the Lounge Theatre, 6201 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. May 19–June 24. Fri. and Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m. (323) 960-7740 or www.plays411.com/RedQueen.