Austin Pendleton Directs TRYING At Cape May Stage

(CAPE MAY, NJ) --- Austin Pendleton, the acclaimed Broadway director and actor, will direct the inter-generational drama by Joanna McClelland Glass, Trying, opening at Cape May Stage on October 14.

 

Pendleton, who recently directed the Off-Broadway hit and Pulitzer Prize-winning play Between Riverside and Crazy, by Stephen Adly Guirgis, is a stage and screen veteran who won fame for playing Motel in Fiddler on the Roof, opposite Zero Mostel, on Broadway in 1968, and who has appeared in 200 films and on television in such shows as Homicide, Oz, and Law and Order. He was nominated for a Tony award for directing Elizabeth Taylor and Maureen Stapleton in The Little Foxes on Broadway, and in 2009 he directed Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Saarsgard in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.

 

In Trying, a two-character play about the final year in the life of Francis Biddle, set in 1967, Pendleton directs Howard Green, who plays Biddle, a curmudgeonly 81-year-old who'd served as Franklin Delano Roosevelt's attorney general and as the American chief judge at the Nuremberg tribunal, and Allison Plamondon, who plays Sarah, his plain-spoken young secretary.

 

"I've known about this play for years, because I'm a good friend of Joanna McClelland Glass, and Howard and Allison wanted to work on it with me, so we started playing with it almost a year ago," said Pendleton. "I think it's a beautiful play. It's funny, it's intelligent, and it's urgent. It tells a very moving story about the relationship between these two characters, about the strange path that two people finally take toward each other, if they allow themselves to be vulnerable."

 

The play is based on a true story. Biddle, a scion of the Main Line, establishment Philadelphia Quaker family whose foundation was the nearly one hundred square miles of land that the family purchased from William Penn near Burlington, New Jersey, is near death, and he's settling accounts and dictating his memoirs. Sarah, who comes to work for Biddle, who has a long history of being irascible and difficult to work with, slowly builds a relationship with Biddle, in part by showing the much older man that she's able to stand up for herself. Joanna McClelland Glass, the playwright, based the story on her own real-life experience working for Biddle in the 1960s.

 

Both Howard Green and Allison Plamondon have worked with Pendleton before. Green, who appeared at Cape May Stage last year in A Walk in the Woods, played Gregory Solomon in New York's HB Ensemble production of Arthur Miller's masterpiece, The Price, which was directed by Pendleton, and he has been seen in productions at The New York Shakespeare Festival, The Actors' Studio, American Place Theatre, Lincoln Center Theatre, and in Off-Broadway productions of Waiting for Godot, Anna K., and Family Business.

 

Plamondon, a New York-based actress, choreographer and teacher, performed with Mississippi Mud Productions' Suddenly, Last Summer, which Pendleton directed. She has also appeared in See Bob Run at Planet Connections Festivity and in La Mama's Prometheus Within, where the New York Times said that she delivered a "standout" performance. She has also done award-winning choreography for stage and television and has taught at the Broadway Dance Center.

 

Green, who'd worked with Roy Steinberg, artistic director of Cape May Stage, previously, brought the idea of doing Trying to Steinberg nearly a year ago. "When Howard brought me Trying and said Austin Pendleton was attached as a director, I read the play immediately," says Steinberg.  "It was comic and touching, and it's a perfect fit for Cape May Stage, since the Biddle family is such an important part of the history of this region and this nation.  This is an example of how Cape May Stage has grown these past years: we get distinguished artists bringing work to us and asking to perform here.  I feel humbled and thankful."

 

Trying runs from October 14 through November 15, with a half-price preview on October 13. There'll be a post-show discussion with cast and crew on Friday, October 30, which is free of charge and open to everyone, and a half-price senior matinee on Sunday, October 15. There is also a pay-what-you-wish performance on Friday, November 6. Ticket prices range from $18 for students/military to $33 for seniors and $38 for adults. Opening night tickets - which include an after-party with the director and the cast - are $53. Tickets are available through capemaystage.org or by calling (609) 770-8311.