Murray Mednick has been a playwright for longer than I have been alive. It is quite possible that, if one were to apply to Mednick’s life the same modernist perspective that Mednick applies to his craft, he has been a playwright for longer than he has been alive. He has garnered nearly every possible award in both New York and Los Angeles, and his work has been experienced one way or another by more thespians than probably any other living (and currently producing) modernist American playwright.
Mednick was a playwright in residence at Theatre Genesis in New York for several years and was the group’s co-artistic director from 1970-1974. He was founder and artistic director of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival in La Verne, CA, until 1995, where he, along with colleagues such as Maria Irene Fornes and Sam Shepard, helped to foster the talents of playwrights along the likes of John O’Keefe and Kelly Stuart.
Mednick has a long history of writing and directing site-specific plays wherein a fully sensory experience for the audience is not only desired but is difficult to avoid.
I didn’t know all this last Saturday night when I went to Mednick’s play Daddy-O Dies Well at the Electric Lodge in Venice. I had arrived just in the nick of time and didn’t have time to read the program or the press packet or to recall most of what I had learned in graduate school. I experienced the play as a newbie – as someone who goes to a Dead show for the first time and doesn’t know that you’re supposed to drop acid in order to find the music danceable. Or, for a more modern reference, someone who goes to a Phish gig without first having heard of the Grateful Dead.
Throughout Daddy-O Dies Well, which is the fifth in a series of eight plays, and which includes some highly intriguing elements but which also consists of lots and lots of words, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had missed the passing of the hookah moments before the show. I just wasn’t having the same experience as others around me.
While the staging is clever and the acting top-notch, I found myself craving – through the onslaught of words delivered in abstraction, a slightly more sensory and emotional experience. I wanted to feel something! The smidge of greenery on the protagonist’s throne and the sounds of rain didn’t satiate. Nor did exposition about a significant family tragedy. In fact they all functioned more as taunts – as appetizers to a meal that would not come. This play is not enough about the senses. It is not enough about emotion. It is too much about the words.
And I love words as much as the next guy. I have been as accused as anyone of being esoteric. But I still couldn’t help but wonder why everything was so intellectual and slightly out of reach.
If the play is about a man who longs to teach his stepson about life – organic life – right before he himself dies, and if their final interaction involves a tea made of the hallucinogenic drug ayahuasca, which grows in the lavish jungles of South America, why is this final interaction presented in such an abstract way? Are we the audience meant to feel like pining, crying, raved-out teens whose parents refuse to pick them up? Perhaps.
The father figure is on his deathbed after a traffic accident (actor Hugh Dane brilliantly walks the tricky line between abstract and raw) but aside from overt exposition suggesting this, there is little indication that he is either injured or near death. He is written to be so full of vim, and he says so many sentences, that I am not fully convinced he is about to die.
The stepson, played effortlessly and with such depth by Casey Sullivan, is seemingly in the more desperate position. Not only is he about to lose his father, but he has ingested ayahuasca and hence vomits relentlessly. Because of his constant purging, he (and we) can’t help but ponder the promise of his own death. His mortality is physically quite present.
Now, the themes are woven together expertly. The words do tether – ironically – fragmented families, alien races, and divided geographical locales. The father is a stepfather. The stepson has two ex-wives. With one ex-wife he shares a murdered son. The stepfather is run over by a car. The cultures collide. The mother who is formerly a grandmother speaks to her leftover kin as our own Earth Mother might one day speak to us – of imminent worldwide decay. There is existential quandary and the desire for the broken to be fixed.
My greatest issue lies with the overall emphasis on concept over feeling – feeling either physical or emotional – and with the playwright’s long-held belief that language is at the root of it all.
Because after awhile I stopped hearing the words.
About two thirds of the way through the play I started to receive Daddy-O’s monologues as pelts of incomprehensible sounds rather than as semantic snippets meant to be fathomed. The words turned from rain to hail.
The secondary characters are what helped to keep me generally engaged.
The character Antonio, or rather the Angel of Death, played with range by Peggy A. Blow, functions as a welcome earthly retreat. She is of the physical world. At the outset she dresses and speaks like a cholo; during an interlude she drums and dances like a native; and in the final scenes she pushes the ice cream truck of a working man. Because she is the one who has injured the dying father, she becomes both a harbinger of death and a symbol of real, urban life. While I wrestled with what are arguably stereotypes and contrivances, I appreciated the irony of making the Angel of Death so lively.
The mother, lovingly portrayed by Strawn Bovee, was among my very favorite characters. She is mother to vomiting Gary and mother to us all. Her Mother Earth words are at once authentic and symbolic, so they evoked in me the strongest heart pull.
Marcia, one of Gary’s ex-wives, was another of my favorite characters, largely because the actress who plays her, Melissa Paladino, delivers such a perfect, paradoxical blend of deeply connected and aloof.
The others were and are enticing as well. Dr. Jones (Jack Kehler) adds humor, and Gloria (Elizabeth Greer) adds grace. In fact, The acting is among the play's strongest attributes.
I was intrigued, as well, by certain aspects of the staging, which is clever, and which inspired in me great curiosity. I enjoyed the riddle of it. I relished in the striving to understand why certain choices were made. Six of the seven actors remain on stage throughout the entire play, and they do so with the focus and aplomb of experienced Butoh performers. The actors present their lines outward toward the world more than inward toward one another. They present themselves to the universe as perhaps individuals do in life – in soliloquy. They function on parallel planes that never fully intersect. I can dig that because ultimately we are all alone. More or less completely alone.
I was also tickled by the sound effects (designed by John Zalewski), several of which are sounded by the actors themselves. I loved the clicks and whistles, which bring us, the audience, hints of a lush outside world. I just wanted more! I would have reveled in this intellectual, existentialist play all the more had it been part of a full-on sensuous display.
Daddy-O Dies Well would be a great site-specific event.
I couldn’t help but feel that this play is, as it is currently written and presented, with its focus on language and abstraction and mere splashes of greenery and real-world signs and symbols, too much a modern-day Waiting for Godot, with only a small, trippy twist, and not enough a fully original exploration of what it means to be man on a turning Earth.
And, at that pitch meeting where someone said to someone else, or where the playwright said to himself, “Let’s make Watiing for Godot in the South American jungle where existentialism meets surrealism,” I imagine that someone somewhere said, “Well, that sounds super groovy, but with the inevitable comparisons and supremely high expectations – and with staging that could be doggedly demure – it might not turn out to be everyone’s cup of psychedelic tea.“
In the final analysis, it was only partially mine. Perhaps with a bit of fleshy, maternal milk it would be mine more wholly.
Daddy-O Dies Well, written and directed by Murray Mednick and produced by Padua Playwrights in conjuction with Theater Planners, plays at the Electric Lodge in Venice, CA through May 22, 2011.
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