On Sunday, Jan. 19, at 4 p.m., a new play from screenwriter Joseph Beck, “Our Lady of Queens,” will debut at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington. Austin Pendleton stars in this love story about an elderly Irish Catholic couple celebrating a special birthday party. The play is an estimated 120 minutes long and includes an intermission.
“Joseph Beck’s ‘Our Lady of Queens’ deals with a family in which the mother has been stricken by dementia. Beck meets this head-on and dramatizes it with immediacy, force, tenderness, total reality and fine, tough love,” Pendleton said. “I think it’s a play that will speak overwhelmingly to many, many people, and, like all really fine plays, not only startle them but, in that paradoxical way that fine plays have always done, bring them comfort and a feeling that they are not alone.”
Pendleton is an actor, director and playwright. He has acted in about 250 movies and appeared several times in such TV shows as “Homicide,” “Oz” and “Law and Order.” He has acted on stage in New York on Broadway, appearing in plays like “Choir Boy” at Manhattan Theatre Club, “The Diary Of Anne Frank” with Natalie Portman and as Motel the Tailor in the original cast of “Fiddler on the Roof.” He’s also appeared in off-Broadway plays like “The Last Sweet Days Of Isaac,” for which he was awarded an Obie, “Rosmersholm” at Manhattan Theatre Club, Arthur Miller and Stanley Silverman’s musical “Up From Paradise” at Jewish Rep and “Educating Rita” with Laurie Metcalf. Additionally, Pendleton has acted in off-off-Broadway, with titular roles in “King Lear,” “Hamlet,” “Richard the Third” and “Richard the Second.”
As a director, Pendleton has been represented by the premiere productions of Stephen Adly Giurgis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “Between Riverside and Crazy.” He’s also been represented by Chekhov productions at Classic Stage Company, including “Three Sisters,” which starred Maggie Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard and Jessica Hecht, “Ivanov,” starring Ethan Hawke, “Hamlet,” starring Peter Sarsgaard and “The Little Foxes” on Broadway, with Elizabeth Taylor and Maureen Stapleton. “The Little Foxes” earned five Tony nominations, one for direction and three for actors, including Taylor and Stapleton. Pendleton also won an Obie for “Three Sisters.”
Program event fees are $25 for Cinema Arts Centre members and $30 for the public. To learn more about the Cinema Arts Centre visit its website at www.cinemaartscentre.org, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
Submitted by the Cinema Arts Centre
