FIVE QUESTIONS FOR ... MANDY PATINKIN

HIS LONDON ONE-MAN SHOW, HIS ONLY GAY EXPERIENCE, THE MIDDLE EAST, WHAT FAILURE HAS TAUGHT HIM, AND WHAT GIVES HIM HOPE IN THESE TIMES THAT CAN SEEM SO LACKING IN IT

“Purpose is but the slave to memory,” says The Player King in Hamlet. The first time I have a memory myself of seeing Mandy Patinkin on a stage - he is a person who has always limned his prodigious talents with purpose - is at the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center in 1975 in a production of Hamlet starring Sam Waterston as the title character. Mandy played Fortinbras, a role that is often cut in productions of the play. And yet of all the things I remember about that production - Waterston’s antic disposition, Jane Alexander’s low-cut gowns as Gertrude, Charles Cioffi’s ladies-who-lunch grey-tinged coif as the overly furred Claudius, John Heard as a rather hot Guildenstern, a pre-Sweeney/pre-Albin George Hearn in his hunkier days as a dashing Horatio - it is Mandy’s entrance as Fortinbras that stands out the most for me. I was overwhelmed by his stage presence without his having stagily to preen to convey it. I have always found Jewish men attractive - I confess they are my weakness - but this was something else. There was a swagger to him that had some sort of masculine sweetness embedded in it that made it even more appealing. He was already imbued with the star presence that would be honed in the roles he would later create, Che in Evita and Seurat in Sunday in the Park with George and, most of all to me, yes, Saul in Homeland because in his brilliance in that role Mandy made the truest transition from his being the right debonair choice to play Inigo Montoya, the fencing master, in The Princess Bride, to his being the character actor who was the right choice for the complicated Saul because his demeanor had a dashed quality to it more than a dashing one, a wariness about anyone debonair enough to want to be even more so. Mandy himself conversely has a wariness he wears rather debonairly - but even more deeply with dearness. He’s a mensch with a mien of mindful wonder still about him. Fatherless like both Fortinbras and Montoya - Mandy’s father died of pancreatic cancer when Mandy was 18 - he still has the air of a boy who had to battle the world without a sword being handed off to him thus had to figure out another way to navigate his life so he could live it to the hilt without the need to hold a hilt to do it. Such a hilt-less lived-to-the-hilt life - he is a twenty-year prostate cancer surviver himself - is the key I think to his social activism which is so important to him.

A couple of months before Hamlet, he was in the cast of Trelawny of the “Wells” there at the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center with an equally young Meryl Streep making her New York stage debut along with him. In preparation for this interview, I went back and found the reviews of both those Lincoln Center productions in The New York Times. I noticed that opposite the review of Trelawny was an ad for an upcoming Broadway production of Yentl as if it were teasing him about his future in films. When I then went down into the theatre listings to see what was playing in New York that October of 1975, the two productions were stacked next to each other - and, good lord, notice the prices for the tickets.

Everything connects, for another seminal role for him was the later cinematic musical version of Yentl for which director and costar Barbra Streisand cast him as her love interest, Avigdor. Just the other day in The New York Times review of the new memoir, My Name is Barbra, Alexandra Jacobs noted, when also noting that there is no index in the almost 1000-page book, “Tabulating all the boyfriends and admirers - ‘I thought we were going to have an affair,’ the married Mandy Patinkin tearily implored her during Yentl, she writes - might require a second index.”

Mandy has been married to actress and writer Kathryn Grody for 43 years. Their videos during the COVID lockdown brought them a whole new audience because of their bantering wit folded so expertly into their mindful politics. Think Lucy and Desi if Mandy’s Che - a much older and wiser one who no longer takes himself so seriously - had chosen to marry Evita if she had been played by, well, Kathryn Grody. Theirs appears to be one of the great show biz marriages.

This week Mandy arrived in London for an eight-performance run of his one-man show, Being Alive, on the West End at the Lyric Theatre. While he was out on the West Coast still in America to perform the show in Costa Mesa, he took the time to Zoom with me and answer some questions. I felt like that queer kid again back in 1975 who first noticed his star quality before I became a writer who in one of my roles as such wrote qualitatively about such things about so many other stars for the myriad magazine cover stories I have written in the last 40 years. But Mandy that night he made his entrance as Fortinbras was the ur-star I instinctively spotted. I am so glad that I finally got to tell him that.

QUESTION ONE

You went to Juilliard’s Drama Division. So did I. I was Group 8. You were Group 5, I believe. I moved to New York in August of 1975 to start school there. I remember you from the production of Hamlet over at Lincoln Center next door a few months after I began classes. I will never forget you as Fortinbras. When I read your credits that night to figure out who you were, I first discovered you had attended Juilliard. And I distinctly remember thinking, “Fuck. There’s hope. I just found some hope. There’s hope here in this guy.” You imbued me with hope, Mandy. So first I want to thank you for that. I have always wanted to thank you and now 48 years later I can. What in your life gives you hope?

This moment. Why? I mean, this is a fragile moment in this world.

On October 7th, I had a concert that night in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I had to make some adjustments into the program because I felt certain things were not appropriate for that evening. But the moment I walked out onstage, I felt the audience letting me know they were thankful I was there. And I felt them being glad they were there, too. Let’s make the most of it - that’s what I felt. And I gave them everything I had in me.

We’ve all been through a lot over these three weeks. I’ve come to realize I’ve been very blessed with being in a business that is a service business. I’m a mailman for very gifted people who wrote wishes for themselves and the world that some of those great artists couldn’t realize for themselves. But they left them for eternity for the rest of us. When we went back to work after the pandemic - after the three years of what felt like a long sleep - I really tried to create something that was really fun. That’s why I’m calling this latest concert Being Alive. It’s been fun for me to welcome us all back to the theatre and - this is the most important thing - to being together in the same space and healing the silence we went through.

We need this now more than ever. We need to teach it to ourselves every second and we need to teach it to the world. Because the only way these conflicts - wherever you spin the globe and put your finger - are going to come to an end is when we learn to be able to be with what’s not comfortable. We have to learn to sit with the discomfort - but to be with your neighbor, to sit with your neighbor. We need to learn to be accepting. I have said in my daily prayers for years these words: “Stop the killing, the hatred, and the violence .. start the loving, the compassion, the forgiveness, and the understanding within yourself to yourself and to each other …”

I have made a very conscious decision in my concerts - it’s an interesting time to be on the road entertaining - not to bring politics onto the stage. Now I can’t avoid with any song I choose to sing whether it’s lighthearted or thoughtful …. well, these songs that live on, that are classics, the gifted people who wrote them had that simplicity and wisdom of a Shakespeare and a Sondheim to know what a timeless, simple thought can mean and be for all of us. I hear those words and they filter through all of us tomorrow and today and yesterday with everything that is happening within the moment I am singing it. It is unavoidable. So that’s the blessing and the curse of being alive.

It is possible that during these London concerts an activist for Palestinian rights could get up to say something, to shout it. London is ripe with activism for Palestinian rights. You walk out on a Saturday next door to the Lyric around Trafalgar Square and you will experience hundreds of thousands marching for those rights. My impulse is to join them but I cannot be associated with so many of them shouting “From the river to the sea.” I will not march alongside people chanting that phrase because of its meaning the destruction of Israel. I assume you’re prepared for any sort of activist disturbance and someone standing up to say something during your concert.

I am prepared - whether it’s you who says something like this or anywhere else in my life. My very clear response - and I read everything that’s out there I can get my hands on - is the only way out of this conflict in the Middle East is what I’ve worked on tirelessly for over 30 years. I am on the Board of Directors of Peace Now and the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies. I have been associated with the Orchard of Abraham. All of these organizations are about living together and a two-state solution. I feel that those of us who have not suffered profound loss on either side need to double, triple, and as my children used to say - infinity double-down - on the peace process. It’s the only way out of this. We need new leadership in both camps that are willing to embrace. If you can get to the moon, you can find out how to live together on earth. My wife told me that every astronaut who circles the earth always remarks on this little blue marble and they come back and they always end up using one word: kindness.

That word is my mantra, Mandy. A simple act of kindness can be a revolutionary act.

I agree with you. So wherever you want to talk to me or engage with me, I’m going to say that there are a lot of people in pain right now. Vengeance and violence is just a perpetual cycle. If revenge is where we are going to turn, then it’s never going to go away.

People are always quoting lines from The Princess Bride but they never seem to quote the ones that William Goldman wrote for my character, Inigo Montoya, to say right at the end of that film. [Mandy switches into the voice of Montoya]. “It’s very, very strange. I have been in the revenge business for so long … now that it’s over I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.” That character and that movie that people have for so long enjoyed, is a story of revenge. Montoya keeps saying he wants his father back and right before he kills The Six-Fingered Man, he puts that sword into him and he says, “I want my father back, you son of a bitch.” And he kicks him away. But the fact is, he did not get his father back. He kills The Six-Fingered Man and he did not get his father back. So revenge does not give us back our fathers - or our sisters and our children.

You made a Yiddish album. I bet there is a song on that album that speaks to this moment we are in now.

Hmmm … well, it’s not on the album but it is in my repertoire. I had “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” written by Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen translated into Yiddish. It is a song written by two men whose fathers were immigrants from Eastern Europe who were fleeing the pogroms. That is why they wrote that song.

I hope you find a way to sing it here in London during your concerts. That would be very moving.

Well, I just might.

QUESTION TWO

You lost your own father when you were 18. I lost mine when I was 7. One lives with not just loss after that, but also an absence. That’s a bit different. The vista you see from then on is you’re-not-there. How has that absence - that vista - affected your life as a man and an artist and a father?

Understand what I’m about to say because it can sound a little weird. It’s really a gift that he gave me. One of the greatest gifts he gave me was that when he passed - not that I didn’t want him to be here, I want him to be here right now, I want him to meet his great grandchild, I want him for every reason in the world - but he did that classic thing. When you kids are older, he said - Marsha, my sister and me - when you finish school, then we’re going to go do this, then we’re going to go do that, then we’re going to take this trip.

Then he got taken from pancreatic cancer at 52 years old. So the lesson he taught me was this: Mandy, don’t wait one second. And to a fault, I am very impulsive. So if I have a thought or an idea - whether it is to call a friend to say hello or to take that job or to take a trip or say something to my kids or my wife - I do it. My younger son Gideon always says to me, “Dad, please, please, please: think before you talk.”

My father taught me in his dying: don’t wait. This life as we get older - as we both know far too well - is a split second. And then we don’t know what happens after. So: don’t miss it, don’t waste it.

That said, my wife and children have always also wanted me for years to be a better listener. Talk less, listen more. A little less Mandy, a little more listener to the others in the room.

You know who finally taught me how to listen? My character on Homeland, Saul Berenson. He taught me to be a better listener. I walked around with that man in my soul for ten years. We had eight seasons but we did them over ten years. And when you do that and you’re given wonderful writers who give you wonderful texts, you learn things - if you’re lucky. And Saul taught me that you gotta listen.

QUESTION THREE

After this conversation, I am seeing Kenneth Branagh in King Lear which just opened on the West End. You are now in your King Lear phase as an actor. You’d be a great Lear. I think Saul would make room for Lear deep down in that artistic, empathetic soul of yours. Any plans to play him?

I am actually looking into it. I am working with my dear friend, Brian Kulick, the Theatre Department Chair at Columbia University. He directed me as Prospero in The Tempest at the Classic Stage Company in New York. He’s my dearest friend. I have a whole lot of books to read that he recommended. I have started to delve into them. Everybody tells me I should take a stab at Lear. I’m so sorry to say I think I’m, yes, old enough now to do it.

Well, y’are, Blanche.

(Laughing) That’s what I’m probably going to figure out soon. Joe Papp [director and founder of The Public Theatre in New York] was a very, very dear influence on my life and on Kathryn’s. When I was playing Leontes in James Lapine’s production of A Winter’s Tale back in 1989 at The Public, Joe came back one night and said, “Listen, you’ve got six Monday nights off. Play Leontes for me and try your music thing on those six Monday nights here at The Public.”

That first Monday night I did it, I got through it and Joe comes backstage at the Anspacher and puts his hands on me. He stares at me in my dressing room mirror. I’m wiping the sweat off my brow. He puts his hands on my shoulders and looks at me in that mirror and he says, “Well, I guess you like doin’ that.” I said, “I did, Joe. I did.” He said, “Okay. You’re goin’ to need to do it your whole life. But you’re also goin’ to need to do the classics. So keep doin’em.” I do know if Joe were still with us he’d be going, “What the fuck are you doin’?”

Well, he is with us because you just invoked him. He’s present in some way.

You bet. I couldn’t agree with you more. My favorite words from anybody in our world, Kevin, when we lose someone, are from Oscar Hammerstein. When someone is experiencing loss I quote Oscar Hammerstein from his libretto of Carousel. My favorite words in all of literature you just quoted in a different way - which are, “As long as there’s one person on earth who remembers you, it isn’t over.” I love it. I offer it to anybody who in a moment of loss is trying to understand where their loved one is.

You have always had an element in your intensity - and I consider you intense, Mandy - of being a conduit. You are quite conscious and mindful, it seems to me, of being a channel for your activism and your art. It is almost as if you are saying, “It is not about me. It is coming through me.” I have no idea if that is true, but it is certainly what I sense.

That means a great deal to me. You have just almost mirrored word-for-word what my late dear friend Debbie Friedman used to say. Debbie was the Reformed Jewish liturgical composer of my generation. She was my dearest friend. She made many recordings and died prematurely. We were just connected in the deepest way. She said to me one day, “You know, I don’t know where the music comes from. I really don’t know where it comes from. It just goes through me and goes out into the world and the folks.” I looked at her because she was a little sad. I said, “So it’s going through you but it’s not going into you.” Meaning it was a hose but without those little holes in it for the garden in the land of Debbie and the land of Mandy. I do my best that when I speak to someone or sing to someone that the hose inside me that is channeling other people’s thoughts and words and music is focused not on me - yet the good thing about getting older is that the hose also gets older and it starts to crack a bit and it does begin to seep into your own soul. That was the most meaningful conversation I ever had and you’ve literally just mirrored it.

Maybe I just channeled Debbie and I was her conduit. Maybe my having the impulse in that moment to say that was a way for her to come through me to you. Maybe she is saying, “Hello, Mandy.”

You did it almost word-for-word. So thank you. Yes, hello, Debbie.

QUESTION FOUR

Another one of your early stage performances was in the original production of the Pulitzer Prize winning play, The Shadow Box, by Michael Cristofer. You played Laurence Luckinbill’s young gay lover in that. You’re old enough now not to give a shit and answer this next question. Have you ever had any gay experiences yourself?

I was living on 74th Street in New York right around the corner from The Candle bar.

I remember The Candle.

I was really depressed one day. I thought, shit, man, I don’t know. I walk by this Candle bar every day. I hear it’s a gay bar. I’ve never been in a gay bar. Let me go in there. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe I’m a gay person. So I go in and I sit at the bar. And there’s this guy sitting at the bar. He looks like a normal tough guy. And I’m waiting. I don’t know whether I should leave. Should I go. I turned to him finally after just sitting there doing nothing. I don’t even drink. So I think I had asked for water. I’m probably about 20 years old. I finally worked up the courage to turn to him and said hi. And he turns to me and said, “What the fuck do you want?” So I got up and I left. That’s as close as I ever came.

Taylor Mac is a good friend of mine. We did a show together [The Last Two People On Earth: An Apocalyptic Vaudeville directed by Susan Stroman]. I love him. One day Taylor was talking about straight men. He said, “What the fuck is the matter with straight men always worried about ‘gay gay gay.’ Haven’t they ever masturbated? That’s all it is, folks.”

QUESTION FIVE

You have had such successes in your life. But what have the failures taught you?

Everything. I wouldn’t know anything without the failures. It’s corny as hell, but with success they pat you on your back and they send you on your way. But with failures, they turn you inside out and upside down. You look at them all over and above them and under them. You keep looking at them over and over and over. And they teach you everything you know. I don’t know who I’d be without my failures. Humility - along with kindness, as we’ve talked about - are the two things I look for most in myself and in others. People who don’t have humility, I sort of move away from because I can’t bare it.

Your father was in the very successful scrap metal business. The scrap metal of your life is …

My father did not want to be in that business. But he injured himself as a teenager and had an operation during World War II and was paralyzed and had to learn to walk and talk again. He was forced to weigh trucks at the junkyard. That was my dad’s job. He hated it. Then he opened up a dry cleaning business and that went bust. Then: scrap metal. So when you say scrap metal I say: follow your dreams. When my dad died my mother inherited the stock in the family business [in Chicago] and she asked us before she sold it to another family if we wanted to keep that stock so that in case I changed my mind or it doesn’t go well in the arts that I’d have the family business to fall back on. And I said, “Mom, that’s your money. You use it and live with it. You have fun. I don’t want a fallback position. I don’t want a Plan B. I’m going for this.” I gave myself five years to make sure I could make a living. Because I wanted to have a family. I wanted to put food on the table and a roof over our heads.

I remember the moment I was accepted to Juilliard. I bet you do too. Let’s bring this full circle.

I do. I didn’t know who John Houseman and Michael Kahn were. [They ran the Juilliard Drama Division during its early years.]. I did my pieces for them at the Hull-House Theatre in Chicago. I didn’t think I’d get into either the Goodman Theatre school or Juilliard but when I got in, I chose the one furtherest away from Chicago because I just wanted to get far away from home. My audition pieces were the “Death in a Box” speech from Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead and Edmund’s Bastard Speech from King Lear.

A role and speech - Edmund in Lear - I did in my first year at Juilliard. Everything connects and the circle is now complete. Thank you again, Mandy. You have been so, yes, kind to do this.

Thank you, Kevin. I’ve enjoyed it. I look forward to seeing you somewhere down the road.

[You can follow Mandy and Kathryn on Instagram at mandypatinkin ]