Austin Pendleton isn’t one to make mistakes as a director.
Following a Tribeca Film Festival screening of “Starring Austin Pendleton,” the documentary about the character actor-turned-helmer, actor George Morfogen explained why. “A mistake one day can be an inspiration the next,” he said. “And that takes confidence as well as artistry. If you’re always fixing things, you’re constantly disintegrating the fabric. Sometimes by not fixing it you create a moment that’s much more sublime. I’m not sure if that makes sense—but it does when you’re on the floor being directed.”
Four months later, Pendleton has directed a cast of actors, Morfogen included, into moments of sublimity for the Off-Broadway revival of N.C. Hunter’s play “A Day by the Sea” at New York City’s Mint Theater Company.
The ability to draw out weighty performances is a skill Pendleton acquired in his own days as an actor working with different directors and styles, and later teaching at HB Studio in NYC. Pendleton built his craft onstage, making his Broadway debut in “Fiddler on the Roof” in 1964 before taking on character bits in films—most famously in “My Cousin Vinny,” in which he played a stuttering lawyer, and “A Beautiful Mind.”
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A true actor’s director, Pendleton guides his cast with a “looseness” that isn’t altogether intended, he admits, but which can “come off that way sometimes.” “You try and create a relaxing atmosphere, but it’s not anything goes,” he says of employing harsh feedback in a comfortable space. “A Day by the Sea” functions on a similar plane. Set in idyllic English gardens and on beaches in 1953 Dorset, the story’s tensions are exaggerated by its tranquil surroundings. Contained in the golden frame surrounding the stage (the set was designed by Charles Morgan) are life’s various junctures—from childhood to meandering middle age, straight through to the late years.
Hunter examines themes of time, love, and wondering what could’ve been through 40-year-old Julian Anson, a Foreign Service employee facing the consequences of his workhorse ways and the miniscule gains they’ve yielded. When he comes to visit his mother, Laura, by the seaside, her own hopes for her son mix with an uncompromising determination to care for her elderly brother when the drunken doctor she hired falls short. Adding another shade to the picture is Julian’s childhood crush Frances, whom he hasn’t seen in 20 years and who is visiting with her children and spinster governess Miss Mathieson.
Under Pendleton’s direction, the cast delivers a quiet contemplation on life’s choices that builds gradually over the course of the production. Although he never studied with him, Pendleton references Lee Strasberg when describing how he works with actors.
“We go over every moment of the play. That’s what happens with a director you work with who’s helpful, you just go over every moment and you try to figure out what it’s about,” he says. “There’s this thing in any scene: Every scene has an event.... You work on the scene until you figure out what the event is. Then you essentially say [to the actor], ‘Anything you do that will convey or make that event happen, that will be fine. But if it strays from that event or it blurs or it eliminates it, then that’s wrong. You can’t do that.’ ”
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The significance of each moment and the obvious or subtle shifts between characters’ dynamics mean no one scene is emphasized more than another during rehearsal.
“You don’t pick a favorite [scene]—that’s important,” says Pendleton. “Every scene has to be equally important. Not to the audience, because that’s not a way to tell a story, but it has to be equally important to you. You have to communicate to the cast of any given scene, ‘This scene has to be clear or the whole play will fall apart.’ That’s the whole analogy of the infinite chain—it’s exact. If one link goes weak the whole chain falls apart.”
“A Day by the Sea” stars Julian Elfer, Philip Goodwin, Polly McKie, Jill Tanner, Katie Firth, Curzon Dobell, and George Morfogen, and has extended its run at the Mint Theater Company now through Oct. 23.
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