Austin Pendleton: A Matter of Life and Death

About the author:
It's been quite a year for Austin Pendleton. His performance as the chaplain in Meryl Streep's starry Central Park Mother Courage and Her Children was bookended by his appearance in Chicago and now at New York's 59E59 Theater in The Sunset Limited, a new play by acclaimed novelist Cormac McCarthy. A production of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, the play is a challenging 90-minute argument about the meaning of life and whether it's worth living. As a suicidal professor labeled "White", Pendleton argues the cosmic questions with a religious, African-American ex-convict labeled "Black", to heartbreaking effect. In recent years, this multitalented theater artist has divided his time between acting and writing. His play Orson's Shadow was a popular hit both at Steppenwolf, where he's been an ensemble member since 1987, and off-Broadway at the Barrow Street Theatre. Broadway.com recently asked Pendleton to tell us how and why he entered McCarthy's dark world.

About a year and a half ago, Martha Lavey, the glorious artistic director at Steppenwolf, the Chicago theater where I'm an ensemble member, asked if I'd be interested in thinking about being in a new two-character play by Cormac McCarthy called The Sunset Limited. I said, in that conversation, I'd be interested in doing the play. Martha tactfully inquired whether I should perhaps read it first. I said of course I'd love to read it, but right then, in that conversation, I knew I wanted to be in the play. At least I think I said these things out loud. I certainly thought them. I mean, I wanted to do the play, whatever it was, simply to meet the man. And even if I didn't think, upon reading it, that the play worked, I'd be happy to be in it simply to grapple with his writing.

I had read several of his novels at this point; I'd been introduced to them a few years before by a really good actor friend of mine, Garret Dillahunt. I was haunted by the writing in these books, by the people in them, by the way the lives and the places were created, by the obsessions. Suttree spoke the most directly to me in purely human terms. Blood Meridien is the most awesome—I'm using that word in the old sense—dramatization of evil I've ever read. All the Pretty Horses is painfully lovely. The Crossing is an ambitious, elaborate metaphor about, well, a crossing. No Country for Old Men is a modern horror thriller that you just can't put down. I've started The Road his new one, which looks to be terrifying. The man's vision gets darker and more fearless all the time. I was determined to be in this play.

Then I read The Sunset Limited. I thought it worked beautifully. The challenge of it was enormous, not only because it was and is a very unusual play in its use of theater, but because it dealt, head-on, with a most terrifying idea. In the play, an African-American man—played by a terrific Chicago actor named Freeman Coffey, whom I'd heard about but never met and whose work I'd never seen—rescues a white man, a stranger, from a suicide attempt on a New York City subway platform, brings this stranger back to his apartment in what is essentially a crack house, locks the door and tries to talk this man out of trying to kill himself again.

That's it. That's the story. The two guys struggle over the question of life and death. The play is written in that potent brew of pungency and soaring, dark lyricism characteristic of the dialogue that runs through all of Cormac's novels. It's unsparing, and it's full of surprising moments of tenderness and humor; both of these elements are also true of the novels. We did it in Chicago this spring, and I've rarely been in a play, ever, that had such a gripping, engaging effect on audiences. We had talk-backs almost every night after the show. The audience did not want to leave. They wanted to talk; they wanted to stay with the experience. So did we, in the larger sense; we wanted the run to go on and on.

After I was back in New York, Martha called and said Steppenwolf wanted to bring the play here for a month-long run. With Freeman and me. With our director, Sheldon Patinkin. I could not believe this exciting news. And now Cormac has made some revisions that make everything that's difficult and challenging about doing the play even more so. This is like catnip to me. Because the depth of this play seems to me inexhaustible—at least, I have no idea how one would ever exhaust it.

But, then, he's a great writer. He's unsparing. He's compassionate. He understands about words, and about people, and their deepest terrors and even joys.

This whole experience is a gift.