Drawn Back to Padua Hills

When playwright Murray Mednick was growing up in Woodridge, in the Catskill Mountains of New York, his small town was almost an American version of an Eastern European shtetl.

Most of the residents were Jewish. Yiddish as well as English was commonly heard. Mednick’s family lived across the street from a synagogue.

Unlike the original shtetls, however, Woodridge’s economy was heavily dependent on tourists. Every summer in that post-World War II period, the town was flooded by a wave of New York City Jews.

The most familiar image of those oft-celebrated Borscht Belt years is one of summer fun, stoked by the comics who performed in the hotels. That period in the Catskills is often considered the fountainhead of much of the American comedy that followed. Mednick himself worked in the hotels-as a busboy and waiter.

Underneath the joking, however, was a much harsher reality. Mednick evokes this world and its repercussions in three plays, all new to Los Angeles: “16 Routines,” ’Joe and Betty” and “Mrs. Feuerstein.” Beginning with “16 Routines” Friday, they will be produced in succession at 2100 Square Feet, a 65-seat theater on the fringe of the Fairfax District, the postwar Jewish heart of L.A.

The three plays mark the partial return of one of L.A.’s creative fountainheads-the Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop/Festival. From 1978 to 1995, Padua Hills was the summer home of a group of writers who worked with students and also saw their own plays produced-usually in site-specific, outdoor venues. Among the Padua participants were Sam Shepard, Maria Irene Fornes, Jon Robin Baitz, John Steppling, Kelly Stuart and John O’Keefe.

Mednick founded the festival and directed it for most of its existence. But the group never developed an administrative infrastructure that would keep it thriving. Perpetually desperate for funds and institutional support, the festival moved often-using 10 Los Angeles County sites for 15 workshops or festivals in 17 years.

Since the festival ended, some of the Padua writers continued to work in loosely formed groups with new, tantalizing names: the Steppling-sponsored Empire Red Lip (which folded when Steppling moved to Europe) and the Oxblood. These groups performed most often at Glaxa Studios in Silver Lake. Mednick occasionally contributed to these efforts.

The new Padua Playwrights Productions is Mednick’s attempt to begin anew, but on different terms. Funded by previous Padua Hills donors whom Mednick declined to identify, the new company hired Guy Zimmerman, 38, as artistic director, allowing Mednick, 61, to concentrate on writing and teaching. Workshops may resume by next fall. Unlike Padua’s previous incarnation, the group will present productions one at a time-not simultaneously as in the Padua Hills festivals. They’ll take place inside sub-100-seat, rented theater spaces-although the group is looking for a home of its own.

“Since we stopped doing Padua Hills, I’ve written more than ever,” Mednick said. In addition to the new company’s productions, his play “Fedunn,” set in a Catskills hotel, may be produced at the Coronet Theatre next fall.

The first three Padua plays may lead to speculation that the new company will be all-Mednick all the time, but Zimmerman pledged otherwise. “Murray has been very generous to other playwrights through the years, and it’s appropriate that we start by redressing that balance a bit,” he said. He likened the initial programming to that of the Signature Theatre in New York, which devotes each season to the work of only one writer. But Padua hopes to produce new work by Steppling and others in coming seasons.

The initial trio of plays will be L.A.’s first glimpse at Mednick’s most autobiographical work yet-especially the second play, “Joe and Betty.” Set in the Catskills in 1951, it’s named after Mednick’s parents, Joseph Saul and Betty Mednick. Many of the scenes, the playwright said, are “right out of my childhood.”

Among the details that correspond to Mednick’s own particulars: The play’s Joe and Betty have six kids (Murray, here named Emile, was the oldest); Joe is a movie projectionist and truck driver; the family is on what was then called relief, now known as welfare; they left Brooklyn for the Catskills so Joe could be closer to his mother; Betty resented the move; Joe’s best friend is a Gentile Polish American named Stan; one of Joe’s brothers moved to California and sold cars.

“It’s still fiction,” Mednick said. “The sheer act of writing makes it fiction.” But playgoers may be forgiven if they cluck in sympathy with Mednick after seeing “Joe and Betty’: It’s not a pretty picture.

“I had a difficult childhood, but I also was very happy sometimes,” Mednick said. “I enjoyed being close to nature and playing sports. It wasn’t all bleak.”

The play’s Joe and Betty look like a match that won’t last, so perhaps it’s no surprise that Mednick’s parents split up several decades ago. His father died in 1987, but his 82-year-old mother still lives in the Catskills, in a retirement home.

“16 Routines” is set in a stylized version of an imaginary retirement home, called in the stage directions “a home for distressed actors.” Mednick’s characters are old troupers, “informed by the spirit of those old Jewish comics like Jack Benny.” Although, again, the situation is dispiriting, Mednick says this play is “a special kind of funny. You’re laughing as a way of sharing in the truth of it.” He acknowledged that “you can see Beckett in the background” of “16 Routines.” Unlike “Joe and Betty,” which was produced at a small theater in Atlanta, “16 Routines” and “Mrs. Feuerstein” will receive their premieres here.

The title character of the third play, “Mrs. Feuerstein,” is a former war refugee still obsessed-decades later-with avenging the Holocaust. She obtains a job teaching creative writing in a private, heavily Jewish school, where she meets a non-Jewish, German American faculty member and begins to fantasize about him and his wife. The play contains scenes of Mrs. Feuerstein’s own play, in which she expresses her fantasies. Mednick was teaching playwriting at a Jewish school, not far from 2100 Square Feet, when he began writing “Mrs. Feuerstein,” though he said the play is “obviously a projection,” not based on anyone in particular.

Nevertheless, Mednick has known a number of Holocaust survivors who immigrated to America. Soon after the Mednicks moved to the mountains when Murray was 6, a woman approached him on the street and, in a thick German accent, asked if he would play with her son. They were German Jews who had just moved to America. The immigrant boy became Murray’s best friend at the time. “The cheap hotels were almost all filled with refugees,” Mednick said.

In “Mrs. Feuerstein,” Mednick said, “I’m trying to deal with the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust, the difficulty of assimilating the truth. The whole idea of history doesn’t mean anything if such a thing can happen.” Mednick says of the Holocaust that Jews must “share in the sorrow forever. If it’s not remembered fully, it would debase the dead.”

Mednick belongs to Ohr HaTorah Congregation on the Westside, but he considers himself a secular Jew: “I don’t believe in God in the ordinary sense, but I do believe in a spiritual search for meaning. I respect the traditions.”

Mednick’s wife, photographer and author Christina Mednick, is not Jewish. They have a daughter, 5, whom they adopted from China. She is the most pressing reason why Mednick stopped smoking last fall after 50 years of “loving” the habit, he said. “I want to be around as long as possible.”

The post-Padua Hills years appear to have been personally enriching for Mednick, so much so that one may wonder why he wants to return to the Padua label at all. But once he starts talking about the meaning of Padua, it’s clear that he hasn’t lost the faith.

Padua’s teaching is “based in a literary knowledge, with a seriousness of purpose that isn’t necessarily commercial,” he said. “Both the writing and the acting are like realism-plus. Ordinary exchanges of life are put in an occasion that heightens them. The dialogue is really the action; it has a life of its own. The story is reflected by the dialogue.”

A Padua writer “searches within for a voice-then from that, discovers the theme.” Mednick’s new trilogy may be the most personal expression of his voice yet seen.

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“16 ROUTINES,” ’JOE AND BETTY,” ’MRS. FEUERSTEIN,” 2100 Square Feet, 5615 San Vicente Blvd., L.A. Dates: “16 Routines,” Friday-May 5; “Joe and Betty,” May 25-June 23; “Mrs. Feuerstein,” July 6-Aug. 4. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Price: $15. Phone: (323) 692-2652.