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Clown Show for Bruno
A Play by
Murray Mednick
Press Release

Feb 27th, 8pm - PushPush Theater
Feb 28th, 7:30pm - Goethe Institute Library

OVERVIEW
In May of 2001 workers from Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum ignited an international uproar when they chiseled five fragments from a newly discovered series of wall paintings in the Ukraine and took them back to Jerusalem to be viewed (see Appendix). The paintings were created by Polish-Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz, who was killed by a Nazi officer in 1944, and who is now the subject of Clown Show for Bruno, a remarkable play by the award-winning playwright and theatrical innovator Murray Mednick. Padua Playwrights in Los Angeles and PushPush Theater in Atlanta are seeking partners for a theatrical production and tour of Mednick’s three-character play, which pays homage to the enduring brilliance of Bruno Schulz and explores the circumstance of his death with an unflinching gaze. Clown Show for Bruno is a human story, as well as a celebration of creative genius and joy in the face of terror.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION AND TIMELINE
The horrors of 1943 remain as pertinent today as they have ever been, and yet contemporary audiences have become inured to the Holocaust and its place in the annals of human horror. A maverick voice in America theater since the 1960s, Mednick brings a searing intelligence to bear on the story of one man’s suffering, mining fresh insights along the way.

A defining voice of the Off-Off Broadway movement, Murray Mednick is an Obie award-winning playwright who has seen an exciting resurgence over the past five years. New plays such as Mrs. Feuerstein, Joe and Betty and The Gary Plays have received multiple award-winning productions in New York, Atlanta and Los Angeles.

Recently, Mednick has been profiled in the New York Times, the L.A. Times, American Theater Magazine and the LA Weekly, and two new anthologies of his plays have been published by New York's Sideshow Books. Mednick is a contemporary American master, and his insistence that the playwright's task is crucially a spiritual and moral one seems refreshing and vital post 9/11.

THEATRICAL PREMIERE AND TOUR
The Bruno Project will bring this important new play to audiences across the United States and abroad, including tours in Poland, Germany, the Ukraine and Israel. Guy Zimmerman’s direction uses elements of mask, clowning and other theatrical disciplines to underscore the lyrical poeticism of Mednick’s text. This timeless production will speak to audiences at all levels – young and old, Jewish and non-Jewish - but will have a particular impact on younger audiences looking for new ways to understand the Nazi genocide.

Key collaborators in the Bruno project include, playing the lead, celebrated Commedia performer and teacher Daniel Stein. After attending the professional actor training program at Carnegie-Mellon University, Stein studied in Paris with French master Etienne Decroux, and made his home in Paris for 20 years. He started his professional career as an actor with the French National Theatre, and his solo performances have toured in more than 30 countries, as well as in theatres such as the Kennedy Center and Lincoln Center here in the United States. Formerly head of the Dell'Arte International School of Physical Theatre, in Blue Lake CA (among many other prestigious teaching credits), Stein is joined for this production by two of his star students, Kali Quinn and Bill Celentano, who have made names for themselves in the Los Angeles and New York theater community. Also on board for Padua’s production of Clown Show for Bruno are award-winning designers John Zelewski (music and sound design), Ann Closs-Farley (costume design) and Jeffrey Atherton (set and mask design.)