BWW Reviews: Murray Mednick's Latest Bows at the Lounge Theatre

The first act of Fool centers on a bizarre audition callback for actor Gary Bean (John Diehl), a character who has been in, including this, seven of Mednick's plays entitled The Gary Plays. Bean's son had been killed suspiciously in a drug deal, and, for his own sense of well-being, Gary is trying to make sense of the premature death. The producers of a movie entitled The Fool and the Red Queen (Jack Kehler and Gray Palmer) monitor the screen test audition of Gary for the character Rikki a soldier, who is, when we see him, almost comatose from so much killing. As such for Gary Bean's characterFool is a play within a play. In the second act, begun at the end of Act I by the Red Queen (Julia Prud'homme) calling for her Fool (Bill Celentano), we are transported to a medieval time and fictitious place where the ranting Queen berates and victimizes her Fool, kind of like Martha of George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? What we witness  could be a marriage - it certainly has its seductively sensual moments - or it could be any boss blaming a plan gone awry on his (her) employee. The Queen is ultimately brought down and distraught over her subjects' reactions to her waging a devastating war. What we get in the long run is quite bleak: war cannot be contained and everyone will die, one way or another. It's inevitable. From Becket's Waiting for Godot to Jerry Seinfeld's sitcom where he excuses the plot as representing nothing, from past to present time, the theme is meaninglessness. Supremacy and inferiority do not actually exist.