page_title: Theatre Genesis
section_title: Melfi, Koutoukas, and Mednick
hierarchical_section_title: Theatre Genesis / Early history of the theatre / Melfi, Koutoukas, and Mednick
caption_attribution_description: English: Linda Eskenas in Oscar Wilde’s “Salome,” Theatre Genesis
context_page_description: Theatre Genesis was an off-off-Broadway theater founded in 1964 by Ralph Cook. Located in the historic St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery in the East Village of Manhattan, it produced the work of new American playwrights, including Lanford Wilson, Murray Mednick, Leonard Melfi, Walter Hadler, and Sam Shepard. Theatre Genesis is often credited as one of the original off-off-Broadway theaters, along with Joe Cino's Caffe Cino, Ellen Stewart's La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, and Judson Poets Theatre.
  The theatre was known for its anarchistic, heterosexual, machismo energy, and often produced political plays. Like the other off-off-Broadway theatres, Theatre Genesis used a non-commercial model of production.
context_section_description: Between 1964 and 1966, Cook produced debut productions of many playwrights, including one-acts from a then-unknown Charles L. Mee. Another early production was a version of Medea by H.M. Koutoukas. The production was set in a laundromat, where Medea kills her offspring in the washing machine. Koutoukas was simultaneously having his work produced at Theatre Genesis and Caffe Cino, not having told either theatre about the other theatre's production. The Caffe Cino production had Medea played by a man (Charles Stanley) in drag. When Koutoukas submitted the script to Genesis, the role was played by a woman (Linda Eskenas), which he intended as a prank. Although the production was successful, Cook was angry at Koutoukas. Theatre Genesis' production of Koutoukas' Medea opened on October 31, 1965, the final weekend of the Caffe Cino run. Many favored the campy Cino production. Paul Foster describes the play's climax:   
  Medea was there for you to reach out and touch, forming the unspeakable crime of infanticide in her mind. Then she threw her baby into a laundromat and washed it to death with Oxydol. She slammed the lid down and set the dial on HEAVY LOAD. How can you forget things like that?
  A third production, with the Caffe Cino cast, ran at La MaMa on October 13, 1965. The three productions of Koutoukas' Medea, at Caffe Cino, La MaMa, and Theatre Genesis, furthered the divide between the campiness of the first two theaters and the more masculine persona of Theatre Genesis. 
  Leonard Melfi would become Theatre Genesis' most-produced playwright. In 1965, Melfi had five of his one-acts produced by Cook. He received the most success for his short play Birdbath. The play was written specifically for Cook, who would later direct the production, and was originally titled Coffeecake and Caviar. Birdbath's plot centers around Frankie, who has a one-night stand with a waitress named Velma. They drink and talk into the night, going further into their hidden pasts, until Velma reveals that she murdered her mother earlier that morning. Birdbath remained a staple of off-off-Broadway, receiving a production at La MaMa and later being published by Ellen Stewart in Six From La Mama.
  
  Perhaps the most experimental and enigmatic of the Theatre Genesis playwrights was Murray Mednick. Mednick, who later co-ran Theatre Genesis after Cook's departure, often workshopped his scripts repeatedly with Genesis actors before finalizing the text. His plays The Hunter, Willie the Germ, and The Hawk were ritualistic interpretations of life on the streets. For The Hawk, Mednick developed the script through improvisation with a group of actors over two months. An exploration of drug addiction, The Hawk employed the ritual elements and poetic language emblematic of Theatre Genesis. The free-form style of the play began to appear with greater frequency at theaters like The Living Theater and Joseph Chaikin's The Open Theater, and was a departure from the scripted plays previously produced at Theatre Genesis. Smith, of The Village Voice, wrote: 
  The Hawk is convincingly detailed, yet mysterious... sharply contemporary, the form strange but not obstructive; it is performed with exceptional immediacy and authority; its ultimate intent remains veiled or vague, but the other levels are so rich it doesn't matter.... in moving beyond the documentary realism of the world of heroin addiction, The Hawk and Theatre Genesis had gone a step beyond gritty poetic realism, and for that reason, it was perhaps the most daring venture yet attempted by Genesis and perhaps its single most important achievement.
  Mednick describes his use of poetic language in the play:
  There was a kind of presentational quality to the language which I think we were very influenced by. We had a similar attitude toward language, which has to do with a feeling about the spoken word as an almost shamanistic act, incantatory, ritualistic, as opposed to the theatrical dialogue tradition... We had a very high estimation of the idea of the word itself coming through the medium of the actor.
caption: Linda Eskenas and Anthony Sciabona in "Medea" by Harry M. Koutoukas, Theatre Genesis. Photo by James D. Gossage.
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