Rich ‘Mrs. Feuerstein’ Confronts Evil

Murray Mednick’s “Mrs. Feuerstein,” the third and final play in Padua Playwrights’ all-Mednick season at 2100 Square Feet, is a challenging, rich, sometimes confusing drama that confronts the nature of evil head-on, with no easy answers.

The similarities to Mednick’s “Joe and Betty,” the second play of the season, are profound, as are the differences. The central figures in both plays are tortured, neurotic Jewish women who stumble through life in a miasma of psychic misery. For Betty, the debased mother of “Joe and Betty,” the misery is perversely self-imposed, a generational tic of negativism arising from the ever-present possibility of religious persecution.

For Mrs. Feuerstein, a Holocaust survivor-turned-poet, the experience of persecution has been up-close and horribly personal. Betty is pitiably devoid of the analytical powers to acknowledge her plight or to change her circumstances. Conversely and ironically, Mrs. Feuerstein has spent a lifetime in increasingly obsessive analysis of the evil that she will never be able to fathom or forgive.

“Feuerstein” is set in a small private girls’ school, where the esteemed but impecunious Adele Feuerstein (Maria O’Brien) has taken a teaching position. The time is not specified, but the hemlines on Bridget Phillips’ bright costumes suggest the 1960s.

The focus of Jeffrey Atherton’s stark set is a vase of bright red flowers--an accent echoing the sanguinary elegance of Mrs. Feuerstein’s new associate Max Wohl (Christopher Allport) and his wife, Freida (Lynnda Ferguson). German emigres, Max and Freida inspire the fictionalized Nazi characters in the new play that Mrs. Feuerstein is writing, an increasingly lurid exercise that ultimately threatens to unhinge her sanity.

Mednick’s play-within-a-play concept fascinates, even when it blurs into the gratuitous. Under Roxanne Rogers’ astute direction, and abetted by Rand Ryan’s lighting and O-Lan Jones’ music, O’Brien delivers a towering and protean performance, capturing but never reconciling the enigma of her character, who is alternately a cringing victim and an avenging angel of righteous rage.

“Mrs. Feuerstein,” 2100 Square Feet, 5615 San Vicente Blvd., Los Angeles. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. $20. (323) 692-2652. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.