AUSTIN PENDLETON (Director) is a director, actor, playwright, and teacher of acting.

Recent Broadway roles include The Minutes by Tracy Letts, and Choir Boy, by Tarell McCraney.  His earliest NY acting appearances were in the original NY casts of Oh Dad, Poor Dad…. and Fiddler on the Roof, both directed by Jerome Robbins.

After those he appeared in Hail Scrawdyke, directed by Alan Arkin, for which he won the Clarence Derwent Award; Mike Nichols’s production of The Little Foxes, with Anne Bancroft; and The Last Sweet Days of Isaac, by Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford, for which he won an Obie; and many since.  His Broadway directing credits include The Little Foxes (with Elizabeth Taylor, Tony-nominated), Shelter (a Tony-nominated musical by Cryer and Ford), The Runner Stumbles, by Milan Stitt, and Spoils of War, by Michael Weller, with Kate Nelligan, also Tony-nominated.  Off-Broadway he has directed Between Riverside and Crazy, by Stephen Adly Guirgis (Pultizer Prize Winner), and three Chekhov plays at Classic Stage Company: Three Sisters (for which he won an Obie); Uncle Vanya, with Maggie Gylenhall and Peter Sarsgaard; and Ivanov, with Ethan Hawke.  Off-off Broadway he has directed several plays with Mississippi Mud, and three with Mother of Invention.  He is member of the Ensemble at Chicago’s Tony-winning Steppenwolf Theatre.  He has acted in well over 100 movies, and has been a recurring figure on such TV shows as Oz, Homicide, and Law and Order.  He has written three plays: Booth (which starred Frank Langella), Uncle Bob, and Orson’s Shadow (directed by David Cromer).  He also wrote the book for a musical version of Shaw’s play Candida, conceived by Michael Halberstam of Writers’ Theatre in the Chicago area, with music by Josh Schmidt and lyrics by Jan Tranen.  He teaches acting at HB Studio, founded by Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen, where he also studied acting.

“An unexpectedly multi-layered and complex portrait, entertaining and educational . . . Ginger Grace is a phenomenal talent.”
– Steven Patterson, Associate Director,
The Bridge Street Theatre, Catskill, NY

“The piece is irreplaceable.  It speaks effortlessly to many pressing concerns.”
– Austin Pendleton, Director