I first met Murray in the early 1990s, after I moved to L.A. from New York. I had been aware of his work Off-Off Broadway and was very happy to encounter the vibrant theatre scene he did so much to sustain through the Padua Hills Festival—for me, and for a lot of people, it was an artistic haven along the lines of Black Mountain College, featuring new works by leading playwrights performed by a loose knit company of fantastic talent. Far from leaving a world in which theatre had relevance—this was my assumption leaving NY—I found an arena of formal experimentation that, as a writer at least, was actually richer than what I was leaving in New York. On the strength of a play produced as part of John Steppling’s “Circus Minimus,” at The Lost Studio on La Brea, Murray asked me to direct a couple of his plays. I also participated in a private writing workshop at his place in Mar Vista. Then, in the late 1990s, I approached him about contributing to a season of new work I was producing as part of a playwright’s collective, and he sent me the first of “The Gary Plays” – “Tirade for Three.” It immediately struck me as a stark and cryptic distillation of the tragic effect. We produced the first version with John Diehl, Hank Bunker and Shannon Holt and I guess Murray liked the results enough to keep exploring that terrain. The rest of “The Gary Plays” began to arrive all the way through the next decade, and we produced them all as independent productions, and sometimes in small groupings. The series is uniquely the product of the L.A. theatre community – it could not have been created anywhere else. And Gary, an unemployed actor struggling with grief and self-recrimination after his son’s murder—is an iconic L.A. character. Colliding vaudeville, Beckett, and classical tragedy in a portrait of L.A. noir, the series showcases the kind of world class quality this creative community has been able to produce. – Guy Zimmerman (director of “The Gary Plays”)