Ticket

Coming home

Pendleton returns to share talents, stories

Before returning to Broadway, Austin Pendleton will be returning to the Mahoning Valley.

The Warren native will work with theater students at Youngstown State University on Feb. 10 and then speak about his career at 7 p.m. that evening in Bliss Hall's Ford Theater.

Proceeds from the event will benefit Trumbull New Theatre, the community theater his mother, Frances Pendleton, founded. Its first performances were in the Pendleton's West Market Street home.

TNT is where Pendleton will be on Feb. 12 conducting three acting master classes at the theater. All three are sold out.

During a telephone interview on Monday, Pendleton said the evening program at YSU would be an informal talk driven by questions from the audience.

"I want to talk about whatever they want to know," he said. "When I end up giving a speech, it's about something no one wants to know anything about."

He's being modest. People have been listening to what Pendleton, 81, has to say about acting for more than 50 years. While he's best known for work on stage, film and television, Pendleton has taught acting at New York's HB Studios since 1969.

The respect Pendleton has in the acting community inspired the 2016 documentary short "Starring Austin Pendleton," in which Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke and Maggie Gyllenhaal were among those who praised his talents.

Pendleton made his Broadway debut in 1964, originating the role of Motel the tailor in the musical "Fiddler on the Roof." He will be back on Broadway in April in "The Minutes," a play written by Tracy Letts, a Tony and Pulitzer Prize winner for "August: Osage County."

The show was in previews in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic forced Broadway to shut down. Pendleton is getting ready to resume rehearsals nearly two years later.

"That's totally unique in my experience," he said. "I think that's totally unique in most people's experience."

"The Minutes," which debuted at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre in 2017, takes place during a small town city council meeting and drew inspiration from the political climate in the wake of the 2016 presidential election.

Pendleton said Letts made some changes to the script during the delayed Broadway opening.

"There is a rewrite I haven't read yet," he said. "I have no idea how sweeping the changes are, but the country has changed so radically since we did the play a little over two years ago."

While Broadway is viewed as the pinnacle for the theater, Pendleton always has gone where he finds interesting work and interesting people with whom to work. Last fall, he did "Brighton Beach Memoirs" at Cleveland's Beck Center for the Arts, and he just finished work in the Off-Off Broadway show "This Beautiful Future," although the rave reviews Rita Kalnejais' play receive from places like the New York Times indicates it has a future beyond the tiny performance space where it made its New York debut.

Pendleton, a Tony nominee for best director for his work on Elizabeth Taylor's Broadway debut in "The Little Foxes" in 1981, also is a Tony Award voter. While most theaters in New York have reopened, they aren't matching pre-pandemic attendance.

"I've been to a few shows," Pendleton said. "The house have never been full. They haven't been tiny, but I haven't been in a full house yet. We had full houses for 'This Beautiful Future,' but it was a tiny house."

In addition to his work in the theater as an actor, director and playwright, Pendleton has more than 150 film and television credits. He's appeared opposite Oscar winners and Muppets, and worked with such legendary directors as Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger and Mike Nichols.

One director who also became a friend is Peter Bogdanovich, the two-time Oscar nominee who died in January at age 82. Pendleton appeared in Bogdanovich's 1972 comedy "What's Up, Doc?" with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal as well as Bogdanovich's final feature, 2014's "She's Funny That Way."

Pendleton said they met on the set of "Catch-22," in which Pendleton co-starred. Bogdanovich was there interviewing Orson Welles for a book. That meeting led to Bogdanovich inviting Pendleton to read for a role in the farce, designed to match the style and pace of the Howard Hawks comedies of the 1930s.

"It was a darker version of that kind of movie," Pendleton said. "It was a farce, but it had a darker pull to it."

He described Bogdanovich as "a taskmaster" who would run scenes again and again and again to get the rapid-fire pace he wanted for the dialogue.

"One of the effects of that is it really turned us into an ensemble. There was no hierarchy on that set," he said. "I was staying in a hotel (during filming) and I literally crawled from the door to bed at night. That's the only movie where that's happened.

"When I went to a screening of it, it all looked so effortless. This guy, what a director, he put us through all this effort so we would look effortless. After that, we were friends all of his life."

When they made "She's Funny That Way" 40 years later, Bogdanovich already was suffering the effects of Parkinson's disease.

"I was shocked at Peter's condition. I wondered, 'How is he going to make it through the shooting of this movie ... When it became (time) to shoot the scene, the first shot of what I'm sure he knew would be his last movie, he said, 'Action!' and all the symptoms of his Parkinson's disappeared. And never came back, with minor exceptions, through the entire shoot."