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The celebrated poet and
playwright Murray Mednick recounts his journey from an impoverished childhood
in the Catskills to the poetry cafes and storefront theaters of the Lower East
Side during the turbulent 1960s, and from there to Los Angeles where he became
a leading figure in the theater movement that flourished there in the 1980s and
90s. Depicting his struggles with addiction, the book is lit up with poems and
stories told in the author's streetwise, syncopated style.
Price: $28.00
Pages: 288
Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
Imprint: Padua Playwrights Press
Publication Date:
20 October 2026
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780990725664
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs, PERFORMING ARTS / Theater / General, PERFORMING ARTS / Theater / History & Criticism
“A playwright’s playwright...Mednick has spent his career at the forefront of avant-garde theater.”
—Sandra Ross, LA Weekly
Murray Mednick is the founder of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival and Workshop, where he served as Artistic Director from 1978 through 1995. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1939, he was for many years a playwright-in-residence at New York’s Theatre Genesis, a seminal group in the development of Off-Off Broadway. He is the recipient of two Rockefeller Foundation grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an OBIE, several Bay Area Critics Awards, a 1992 Ovation Lifetime Achievement Award from Theatre LA for outstanding contributions to Los Angeles theater. Mednick was awarded the 2002 Margaret Harford Award for Sustained Excellence in Theater by the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle, and a lifetime achievement award from L.A. Weekly.