Murray Mednick, award-winning playwright and long-time SoCal theater influencer, dies at 86

The 1960s U.S. counter-culture movement ran from Murray Mednick’s veins, to his fingers and onto the blank page.

“He was interested in the artist… and what an artist of integrity would mean in a trying political climate,” said playwright and director Wes Walker, who trained under Mednick in the early 1990s.

The air of upheaval and revolution in the 1960s led Mednick and other playwrights and directors to reject the gloss and bright lights of New York City theater and stage edgy, confrontational performances in small spaces far from Broadway. That movement became so influential it birthed an entire genre of theater: “off Broadway" and “off-off Broadway.”

Keep up with LAist.

If you're enjoying this article, you'll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report. Each weekday, catch up on the 5 most pressing stories to start your morning in 3 minutes or less.

Subscribe

Mednick wrote dozens of plays from 1967 to 2025. Their staging earned him recognition, including the OBIE Award and an Ovation Lifetime Achievement Award from Theatre LA for outstanding contributions to Los Angeles Theatre.

Mednick died on Oct. 17 at 86 years old of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said Christina Singleton via email. She was married to Mednick for 20 years.

Collaborators describe Mednick as a thoughtful and intense person who didn’t spend much time on things he considered frivolous or unimportant.

“Murray was a sort of a combination of Edward G. Robinson and Yoda,” said Guy Zimmerman, who ran the Padua Festival from 2000 to 2020.

Murray Mednick founded the Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop-Festival in Claremont in 1978, which became an influential incubator of experimental theater.

(

Neil France

/

Courtesy Guy Zimmerman

)

“He was a tough guy, but with a lot of heart and he had a huge impact on a huge number of people,” he said.

A theater incubator in the hills of Claremont

Mednick moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1974 and four years later founded the Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop/Festival in Claremont. The festival brought together the marquee names of the New York experimental theater movement, such as Sam Shepard and María Irene Fornés, along with up-and-coming Southern California playwrights, directors, actors, as well as Hollywood writers.

Murray Mednick began his playwriting career in experimental theater in New York in the 1960s.

(

Courtesy Guy Zimmerman

)

“It was just a marvelous environment to be a young developing writer, as I was, and many other young writers,” Zimmerman said of his experience at the workshop

It all starts with the words

Mednick’s collaborators and people who knew his work called him a poet. It’s not empty praise, his bio lists a poetry award from the National Council of the Arts.

“The words were the most important thing of the play,” said Norbert Weisser, a well-known film actor who acted in Mednick’s Coyote Cycle in the early years of the Padua Festival.

“He had a mistrust of acting, of self-indulgence, which most of us actors are capable of,” Weisser said.

That mistrust led Mednick to experiment with characters and dialogue, such as in 2006's G-Nome; directions in the play say the director, actor, and reader should think about and decide who says what.

Mednick also wrote about the trauma of the Holocaust on Jewish Americans, as well as the way human beings carry out rituals. The Coyote Cycle was shaped by his interest in Native American thought.

Some of those elements are key storytelling techniques in the 2020 play Gary's Walk. Directions say props or a set are not necessary and allow for two actors to play multiple roles.

The play is about a father, who's an actor, walking the length of the L.A. River to the sea carrying his son’s ashes after he was killed in a botched drug deal. Along the way the father encounters various people who embody different facets of life in the United States in the 21st century.

“All of them are struggling one way or another to connect and find meaning,” Zimmerman said.

Zimmerman added that his professional relationship with Mednick over the years was intense and since his death he’s been thinking a lot about how serious Mednick was in all aspects of the plays he created.

“I miss him very much,” Zimmerman said.