Dan's Papers - March 7, 2008 - Joseph Pintauro

When it comes to work, Joe Pintauro is a man on the move. Always creating or rewriting, there are few moments when Sag Harbor's own poet, playwright and author takes time to take stock. One of those moments came Monday night when Guild Hall gave him an Annual Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Arts at a gala ceremony at the Rainbow Room in New York.

Anticipation of the award has given him a rare opportunity to put "a temporary period at the end of a hell of a lot of work" to date, and consider his achievements over the last 40 years, Pintauro said in an interview from his home in Key West, Florida last week.

"At first, I didn't think I had achieved a lifetime of literary excellence," he said, declining to reveal his age. "I'm constantly writing and rewriting and I haven't finished doing what I want. So the award kind of surprised me. But since I heard about it, I've taken some time to remember all the things I've put out there."

Those "things" include several volumes of poetry, two books of fiction and two novellas in the works; nearly 50 plays, many of them one-acts; among the full-length plays are Snow Orchid, the critically-acclaimed Raft of the Medusa and Beside Herself and, best known among East End audiences, Men's Lives, an adaptation of the book of the same name by Sagaponack writer Peter Mattheissen. The book - and the play - is about the slow unraveling of life and work for the traditional bay fishermen of the Hamptons.

Pintauro also said the award made him profoundly grateful to the "many people, every critic, every agent, every editor, actor, stagehand I've every worked with." (Guild Hall Lifetime Achievement awards were also presented Monday night to three other people - actor Mel Brooks for Performing Arts; artist David Salle for Visual Arts; and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of CKX, Inc. Robert F.X. Sillerman for Leadership and Philanthropic Endeavors.)

"Joe is a man with a big heart and big eyes who sees a lot of beauty and pain in the world - he writes very eloquently about people going through change," said Josh Gladstone, artistic director of the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall. "He's a very socially conscious and awake writer. When he's not working, he's working. He's constantly scribbling and he writes and rewrites a lot."

Gladstone got some firsthand experience of that scribbling and rewriting last week. Pintauro insisted on rewriting a scene from Beside Herself (a 1989 play about, among other things, a woman who has conversations with all sides of herself) that Gladstone and his wife, actress Kate Meuth, read Monday morning on Bonnie Grice's show on WLIU radio. Actress Sloane Shelton also read monologues from Men's Lives on the broadcast.

It was just one scene, but Pintauro - who was a guest on the show - said, "I looked at the scene, which was originally played by William Hurt in the original production in New York, and I said, 'My God, this needs rewriting.' You're never finished with something, even if it's been published."

Locally, both the John Drew Theater and the Bay Street Theater have produced Pintauro's plays. A series of short plays about theater people, What I Did for Love, was produced at the John Drew in 2002, and a formal reading of Beside Herself was performed in 2006. Murder by Chocolate was produced in 1995.

Bay Street Theater is famously known for producing Men's Lives as its inaugural performance when the theater opened in 1992. Steve Hamilton, founder and executive director, remembers how that play came about.

"We were just founding the theater and we wanted to position ourselves as a community organization, not just a summer theater. I was reading Men's Lives at the time, and I thought, wouldn't this make a great play. But who would the author be? I had known Joe as a beautiful writer and a poetic writer and we called him and asked him if he knew the book."

"And he said, 'Do I! I have an adaptation of a play of the book in my closet, but it is awful.' So we asked to see it and after about 14 drafts...it was ready." The play was so popular it was repeated the following season and the theater also performed a staged reading of the play in September last year.

In 1995, Bay Street also produced By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea, a trilogy of one-act plays all involving three actors on the same beach at different times of day. The plays were written by Pintauro, Lanford Wilson and Terrence McNally. In 1997, Bay Street also produced another Pintauro play, Heaven and Earth, another adaptation of a book by the same name, this time by Steve Wick, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist at Newsday. The book and play capture the lives of the last of the farming families on the North Fork.

"God is the unseen character," in the play, Pintauro, a former priest, said in an interview with the New York Times in July of that year. Though Pintauro is a local hero, his work is known all over the country and has been performed, among other places, in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and London.

Pintauro was born in Ozone Park in Queens. He attended grade school at Public School 62, where his 5th grade teacher, Mrs. Dean, predicted his future after he completed an essay on Abraham Lincoln that imagined the young Abe traveling with his family and viewing the world through the cracks in a wagon.

"I wrote the whole thing without ever mentioning the Gettysburg address," Pintauro recalled, certain he would flunk the assignment. "But the teacher called my mother and said, 'This boy is going to become a writer.'"

At John Adams High School in Queens, Pintauro wrote for the school newspaper, The Flipper, before going on to Manhattan College where he received a bachelor of arts degree. He also attended St. Jerome's College, Ontario, where he received a B.A in Philosophy. He later completed studies for an M.A. in American Literature at Fordham University.

Pintauro's education took a decidedly different turn in the '50s, when, after questioning the meaning of God when his mother got a fatal diagnosis of breast cancer, he decided to study theology at Our Lady of Angels Seminary, Niagara University, in upstate New York. "I was at a stage when I was demanding all these answers to life, death and faith," Pintauro said. "And I loved the seminary." But his subsequent life as a parish priest for the following six to seven years was not altogether satisfying. "I think I was too much of an idealist for it. It sounds like a terrible judgment, but there was a spiritual element that was lacking in the priests around me and my own faith was flagging," he said. Toward the end of his priesthood, Pintauro submitted his first play, A - My Name is Alice, to a contest at the Circle in the Square Theater in New York. He got a call from a then unknown young actor and director named Dustin Hoffman, who had selected his play to direct. "I went to New York and found myself sitting with Dustin and Robert Duvall. We were all quite young at the time. I found I really liked hanging around with these people," he said. "Dustin directed the play and Bob was in it, and that was what started me off." The play is about a man and a woman who have each lost their spouses and meet at a cemetery, where they get drunk together on brandy and ruminate on life and love.

After finally getting permission to leave the priesthood from the Catholic Church, Pintauro joined the Young & Rubicam, Inc. advertising agency in New York, where he worked a day job as a copywriter while writing poetry and more plays in his spare time. After eight years, his outside writing got in the way of his copywriting duties.

Fired from his job, Pintauro needed a place to begin making a living as a poet, playwright and author. Finding his way to Sag Harbor in the late '60s, Pintauro in 1969 invested in two things - a small Victorian house on John Street and a typewriter. In the '70s, he worked on two novels, Cold Hands, and State of Grace both published in the early '80s. The New York Times cited Cold Hands, about a young boy's coming of age, as a best novel of 1980.

Though the typewriter has long since been traded for a computer, Pintauro still works from his house in Sag Harbor, when he isn't spending part of the winter in Florida.

"Lately, I've been working on two pieces of fiction. They are interconnected novellas that add up to one novel," he said, and added he is also at work on an existing play that has been work-shopped in London, Los Angeles and at the New Jersey Repertory Theater in Long Branch, N.J. He didn't want to give the title of his new work, or provide details of the stories.

But, once again, he is rewriting.

"I've taken an ax to the play and restructured it so that now there is a very economical exchange of dialogue," he said.

"I've always thought of myself as a kind of spoiled dilettante writer in that I really do write for myself. I enjoy it so much. I don't think of it as anything that belongs to someone else. It's such a pleasurable addiction for me. And I never thing of something that has a beginning and an end since I'm always rewriting no matter how long a piece has been out there."