A Conversation with Austin Pendleton
Austin Pendleton, who has played the title role in King Lear and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot at New Rep, plays the Marquis de Sade in Quills. Don Cohen spoke with him on December 17, during a break in rehearsals.
Cohen: How did your connection with New Rep come about?
Pendleton: A friend of mine, Adam Zahler, who started working here when Rick Lombardo did, invited me to see The Scarlet Letter. I’d seen the play in New York and it hadn’t worked anywhere near as well for me as Rick’s production. A year later, I was rehearsing The Diary of Anne Frank at the Colonial before it went to Broadway, and Rick asked if Linda Lavin and I would do a performance of Love Letters as a fund raiser on a Monday night, our dark night. That went well for them. Two-and-a-half years later, Rick called out of the blue, asking if I would play King Lear. I never would have thought of myself in that role. Rick and I met and talked way into the night. He told me about his feelings about the play, and I thought, OK, I’m going to do this. It was exciting to do and very controversial. Two years later, he asked me to come and do Godot. And now there’s Quills.
Cohen: Are there particular qualities that you like in this theater that keep you coming back?
Pendleton: It’s edgy and daring—this play is, God knows. Rick has directed all three shows that I’ve been in, and I really like the way he gets to the heart of things. He makes decisions and demands that are very bold.
Cohen: Lear, Godot, and Quills are three very different plays, unless I’m missing something.
Pendleton: They are different, but they’re all very existential and very challenging. All three push the boundaries of what theater can do.
Cohen: You’ve been connected with Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. Are the two theaters at all comparable?
Pendleton: They both like edgy things. They’re both vital. They’re not hidebound. They’re always pushing the envelope,
Cohen: Do you like working in a small theater?
Pendleton: I don’t mind a big theater, but I prefer when it’s smaller. You feel you’re potentially connecting with every person in the audience. You can play more intimately. I like the audiences here; they’re smart. You can tell. There’s a quality of listening that you can feel.
Cohen: Like being aware of the different kinds of silence in an audience—that deeper silence when people are really engaged.
Pendleton: Absolutely. There’s dead silence and there’s electric silence.
Cohen: On the subject of Quills, the play you’re rehearsing now: do you do any special preparation because it’s about a real person and is set a couple of hundred years in the past?
Pendleton: I didn’t want to do a lot of research before I got here. A play is a play, it’s about what it’s about. If you do a lot of research before you get into rehearsal, you find you want to shoehorn all that into the play. Now that I’m rehearsing the play and anything I learn can be absorbed into what the play is, I’m doing more. I try to find little hints here and there, little promising seedlets. Sometimes you find a detail that can be a source of identification.
Cohen: Even if you’re not looking for historical accuracy in Quills, you must have to think about how to portray the culture and language of an earlier time.
Pendleton: Quills is this playwright’s view of that time. It wasn’t written then and it’s not really interested in historical accuracy but, yes, there are still things connected to the language and the behavior that you have to deal with. One thing you can do is look at pictures. One of my acting teachers, Robert Lewis, would have us do an exercise where you look at a painting of someone from an earlier era. You begin with that pose and immediately animate it and try to create the next four or five minutes of their life.
Cohen: Putting yourself into the pose connects you with the person and the time?
Pendleton: It stimulates you to imagine what that life is like. It’s often helpful to learn about the childhood of the character. Sometimes the playwright provides stuff about the character’s childhood. At other times, you need to speculate. But it’s good not to begin until you’re rehearsing the play, so that your response when you first rehearse is very open, without preconceptions.
Cohen: You don’t come with a set view of the role.
Pendleton: First of all, you want to know what the director wants. If you come with a set idea and the director has another one, then you spend the whole rehearsal process dismantling everything or wasting as lot of time arguing. It helps if you come as a tabula rasa.
Cohen: It must be scary, though, not to know how you’re going to play the character.
Pendleton: Not if the director is somebody you trust. You also want to receive impulses from the other actors. If you’ve already made up your mind about what you’re going to do, you’re not impinged on much by the other actors. One of the things any production is about is who’s in it and at what moment in their lives. You want to be open to that.
Cohen: You have some intense, ornate and fairly long speeches in Quills. How do you approach them, to keep the audience with you?
Pendleton: To me, any speech is dialogue, even when the dialogue of whoever you’re talking to happens to be non-verbal. You try not to think of it as, here’s where I talk for a long time, because you don’t ever know whether the person is going to interrupt you or not. You’re constantly triggered through a speech by signals you get from the other person. A speech and a scene always arise out of a conflict you’re having with that person. The long speech is produced by the fact that the other person is silent, so it’s their moment as much as yours. Then there are the parts where I am alone, writing, and I speak what I’m writing. That’s a different challenge. Again, I don’t think of it as a speech that’s a determined length.
Cohen: Maybe it’s a dialogue with yourself. If you’re playing a character who’s unsympathetic—maybe the Marquis de Sade is one—do you try to find balancing elements to create a more rounded or a more likable character?
Pendleton: No. You just try to present the person: This is who it is. You don’t try to make them sympathetic or unsympathetic.
Cohen: The characters in plays—or human beings in life—never say to themselves, what I’m doing is totally unjustified or evil.
Pendleton: Right. Everybody always has a justification. Sometimes the justifications are twisted, by ordinary standards, their actions may still be unforgivable, but the actor has to know why they do what they do. The Marquis de Sade has a very clear reason for doing what he does. People can make of it what they will, and everyone will make something slightly different of it. That’s true of all the really interesting characters. What you hope for is that the character has enough weight as a human being so that the audience can’t dismiss them, can’t quite get them out of their minds—not that they like you or hate you, just that they can’t quite get rid of you.
Cohen: One of the great things about theater—about novels, too—is they let you to be interested in people you would just hate to know in real life.
Pendleton: Exactly. Look at Willy Loman. Who would want to spend ten minutes with that guy, but you get right inside him in Death of a Salesman.
Cohen: Can you say what your core satisfactions as an actor are, that have kept you in this difficult profession?
Pendleton: I don’t know if I can. I like the challenge of it. I would get very bored if I only got parts that asked me to do what I already know I can do. I’d probably be out of the business by now. That happens to some actors. They get typed as one thing. Strenuous efforts have been made in that direction with me.
Cohen: What type?
Pendleton: The absent-minded professor, the shy guy, the guy who trips over his shoelaces. It happens more in the movies than in theater. More often than not, I play characters who are on the margins of life. That’s true of this character. It’s true of either of the guys in Godot. In a way, it’s true of Lear, although he’s a king.
Cohen: He puts himself on the margin.
Pendleton: He does, and he’s always been kind of nuts. Almost all the characters I’ve played in the movies and most of the theater roles, now that I think of it, don’t live in the mainstream of human experience. They’re off to the side somewhere. That’s not really being typed because there are a lot of different kinds of people who are like that, but sometimes it prevents you from being cast in certain parts. People say, “I just can’t believe you in a relationship.” A director said to me, “I don’t know why you want to play this part; this isn’t like those crazy characters you usually play.” Or they say, “The characters you play don’t seem like anybody one would ever meet.” They usually stop short of saying they’re not real people but directors have said to me, “I can’t cast you because this play (or film) is about real people.”
Cohen: How do you take that?
Pendleton: What can you say? If you have to be pigeonholed, that’s a rich pigeonhole to be in, because a lot of wonderful characters are like that.
Cohen: Is there a theater role that you would like to play that you haven’t?
Pendleton: I stopped thinking about parts I wanted to play years ago, because virtually all the parts that I’ve loved are parts I never thought of playing.
Cohen: Have you ever been offered a part and thought, I can’t possibly do justice to it?
Pendleton: King Lear.
Cohen: But you did it.
Pendleton: And I’d probably do it again. Any time you get a good role, you think, I can’t do this. First you say, “Yes,” then you think, Wait a minute, I can’t do this. That doubt becomes part of the sand that you hope causes the pearl. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes even playing little parts in movies, I get on the set and I think, Where’s this going to come from? Any role, large or small, makes some kind of demand. Are you going to convince the audience that you’re this person?
Cohen: Have there been times when that gut feeling of not knowing how to do it turned out to be true?
Pendleton: Probably more than I realize. Actually, Lear was interesting. We got pretty close to the first performances and I thought, I get some of this, but I don’t get the rage and helplessness an old man feels at losing his capacities. I don’t know how to do anything other than act at that in a very empty way. That, unfortunately, is the core of the role. You know what happened? I got in a situation where I had to be catheterized for a week. It happened the night before the first preview—three nights before the opening. It took me a couple of days to get used to it. Opening night, there I was, on stage with this catheter. Rick came back after the performance and said, “You found a lot of new things tonight.” It was this weird kind of gift. The catheter came out a few days later, but for the rest of the run, over a month, I was able to build on what I learned from that experience. You have to understand any role physically, not intellectually. And there it was. I had a foothold, which I couldn’t find all during the rehearsal period.
Cohen: That’s a very immediate case of using your own emotional experience in a role.
Pendleton: That’s the thing about acting. Often you can find something in your own experience that is nowhere near as dramatic as what’s in the play, but it has an equivalent effect on you. But don’t ever tell anybody what you’re using because they’ll say it’s trivial.
Cohen: I can play this holocaust role because my girlfriend dumped me.
Pendleton: Exactly. I’ve seen actors make that mistake in rehearsal. A scene is playing just fine until they tell the director what they’re using. Then the director says, “Oh come on,” and they won’t ever be able to play the scene again. Acting is so pragmatic. If it works for you, use it. You may have an experience that’s exactly the equivalent of what’s in the play in its magnitude and everything, and it doesn’t work for you for some reason. Then don’t use it. Don’t say, “This should be working.” The fact is, it’s not. You may try it for a while, but if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.