The Sadly Familiar Tale of Stymied ‘Joe and Betty’

Playwright Murray Mednick opens a psychic vein in his savagely autobiographical “Joe and Betty” at 2100 Square Feet. Set in New York’s Catskill Mountains in 1951, the play is a loosely fictionalized account of Mednick’s own impoverished boyhood, a Borscht Belt “Lower Depths” with a darkly comic undertone.

Rand Ryan’s gelid lighting design includes a single strip of white light that bisects Jeffrey Atherton’s bleak set, a wry visual metaphor for the emotional polarization of the characters. Joe and Betty’s six children, at no time seen or heard, are the collateral damage in their parents’ ongoing marital war. Although he never appears on stage, the chief victim of his parents’ barrage is Emile, Mednick’s pre-adolescent self, a silent and helpless spectator in his own family tragedy.

As a father, Joe (John Diehl) is neglectful, a feckless blue-collar movie projectionist whose unvarying smirk covers his own massive inadequacies. But it is the criminally ineffectual Betty (Annabelle Gurwitch) who most excites our sympathy and our loathing. A Munch painting come to life, Gurwitch shines and sickens in her uncompromising portrayal of a mother so lost in her own frantic negativism that she unwittingly tortures those she loves.

The play’s snarling, staccato interchanges carry little point and less possibility of compromise, a sort of philosophical dialectic barked by junkyard dogs. In a staging that has the compressed energy of a coiled spring, director Diane Robinson stylizes the proceedings to an almost surreal degree. Characters are purposely affectless, speaking but seldom connecting in any material or human way. Yet the chief irony--and triumph--of the play is the visceral connection made by the once-voiceless Emile/Mednick, who uses the wrenching dysfunction of “Joe and Betty” to so eloquently expiate his own painful past.

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* “Joe and Betty,” 2100 Square Feet, 5615 San Vicente Blvd., L.A. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends June 23. $15. (323) 692-2652. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.