By Harry Haun
19 Jan 2009

Austin Pendleton
photo by David Beyda

Austin Pendleton, now helming Off-Broadway's Uncle Vanya, is proof that the great Welles didn't corner the market on wearing many hats.

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Austin Pendleton — actor, director, playwright, teacher — "a Renaissance man of the American theatre" (or so reads the inscription on his 2007 Drama Desk Special Award for his lifetime achievements) is space-traveling among professions on this sunny wintry morn. He slides into a booth at the Theatre Row Diner for a late-breakfast interview, evidencing all the wear and tear and disarray of an absent-minded professor, which he happens to be at this particular point on the sundial.

Life, a year or so down the road from his lifetime achievement award, is hectic as ever. If anything, his four-hat trick couldn't be more fast and furious — well, it could, but why tempt the gods? "It's a little crowded now for my tastes," even he admits, "but they're projects I've made — except for Uncle Vanya — and they're just happening at the same time. And then Uncle Vanya came up, and I really wanted to do that."

He is coming from The New School (where his directing students have just put up a production of Endgame) — en route to rehearsal down the block at the Theatre Row complex (where he has the title role in The Black Monk) — and ending the day at La MaMa (where he is directing Barbara Eda-Young in a play she has written, Lillian Yuralia). Then there are the acting classes he teaches at HB Studio and The New Play that's ruminating around in his head ("It's hard to talk about yet"). Plus he's working on the book for a musical to be done at Writers' Theatre in Chicago; it has a score by Joshua Schmidt, who composed the acclaimed Adding Machine.

Lillian Yuralia lifts off first. Then he'll see the glimmer of a light at the end of the tunnel. For a few weeks he was rehearsing both that play and The Black Monk, which is an adaptation of an Anton Chekhov short story and a personal warm-up for Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, which he starts directing while still playing The Black Monk.

Tony winner Denis O'Hare will be Vanya when the play began its limited run Jan. 17 at Classic Stage Company — the same place where Pendleton played the part the only time he did it in New York, 21 years ago — and he has done it a lot, "almost as many times as O'Neill's father played The Count of Monte Cristo, seven or eight times. The first time I did it I directed it at Williamstown 36 years ago. Then, 11 years later, I began to be asked to play the role, and I've played it many, many times since 1983."  Continued...

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