Pendleton on McCarthy
Posted by Austin Pendleton on 5/18/2006
Fresh from directing Love Song for our subscription season, ensemble member Austin Pendleton is acting in The Sunset Limited in the Garage. We asked him to reflect on that challenge.
I just want to talk about Cormac McCarthy, and my personal history with his work. Everybody who knows his writing seems to want to talk about their personal history with his work. He’s that kind of writer.
I was sent to coach an actor once who was up for a big role in one of my plays for his audition. Garret Dillahunt is his name. He’s acted at Steppenwolf, and in fact all over the place, in New York theatre in television and movies. At this time I didn’t know him, but I came to like him instantly when he agreed with me there was no point in doing a coaching session (he got the part) and that maybe it would be more fun if we talked about books. At which point he gave his copy of Suttree, by Cormac Mccarthy. When we were in rehearsal he gave me Blood Meridien.
I was stunned by both of these books. I’ve reread them both now that we are doing Cormac McCarthy’s play, The Sunset Limited, here at Steppenwolf. Suttree has a combination of things that only the great writing has. It’s a story of a man in despairing retreat from all sorts of things that pass for normal soical intercourse, and the events and characters in it are challenging. They are the kinds of events, the kind of people that you might be frightened of being around or involved in in life. And yet the book just radiates a joy in being alive. A joy in the sights and the sounds and the habits of sharing that fill these peoples’ lives. The book is funny, terrifying, appalling and celebratory. Only the very greatest writers manage all this at once. And only writers who write like angels.
Blood Meridien is simply the most terrifying evocation of the development of America that I’ve ever read, told within the very narrow focus of a series of dark events in the 19th century. It’s just awful in its power. And yet the quality of the writing is, literallly, ecstatic. Almost like the Book of Revelations. And now I’ve come to know two of the books in the Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing.
They’re both about growing up, which in both cases involves lonely, terrifying rites of passage between the American Southwest and Mexico, and, again, they both glow. You want to be there. You ache to be there.
These contradictions are at their starkest in The Sunset Limited, which is only the second play he’s ever written. I think you’d think it was his 16th play, at least. The dramatic sense in it is at once traditional and frighteningly original. But then maybe it’s because he’s always had this fundamental dramatic split in his vision of life and living. It’s always a rugged challenge to be in any play that’s any good at all, and this play, I think, is remarkable. So it’s especially rugged. But it’s a mountain I’m very excited to have been asked to try to climb, particularly with a director as astute and sensitive as Sheldon Patinkin and a fellow actor — it is, profoundly, a two-character play — as wonderful as Freeman Coffey. Cormac McCarthy is just a gorgeous writer, that’s all. That’s what I think. I hope you read those books. I hope you see this play. I wish you joy, in that and everything.
March 6th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Very interesting!