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Costume parts, props, makeup and lights adorn the dressing room counter backstage. Staff Photo/Kim Smith Dedam
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Susan Neal and Bob Pettee, founding artistic director and company manager, share a smile sorting through boxes filled with 30 years of Pendragon Theatre playbills and performance memorabilia. Pendragon celebrates 30 years at its Adirondack home in Saranac Lake this summer. Staff Photo/Kim Smith Dedam
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Costume and set designer Kent Streed ponders sets beside the theater stage. He has been with Pendragon nearly 20 of the company's 30 years. Staff Photo/Kim Smith Dedam
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Community actors staff many Pendragon productions, like in this promotional image of "Jungle Book."
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Pendragon Theatre delivers 30th repertory season
Like calm before a storm, chains of dark lights and set pieces leaned nonchalant against black backdrops.
Giant rows of jungle grass made of muslin stiffened with olive and brown paint threw shadows at the curtains.
A silk iris lay crushed by a stair where it had fallen from a hand or hat in a corridor offstage.
A dressing-room mirror reflected a snarl of props — wild animal costume parts, bald mannequins, stick puppets, a torch of tulle and gloves laced with holiday lights.
The faint smell of fresh paint mixed with fresh-cut pine.
Long intervals of quiet were separated by a hammer's report and the low hum of conversation.
As if taking a deep breath, Pendragon Theatre seemed poised, ready for its cue, waiting in its own willing suspension of disbelief.
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
Saranac Lake's year-round theater company is about to enter its 30th repertory season.
Artistic director Susan Neal and managing director Bob Pettee stepped through the pause to talk about their long run in the Adirondacks.
The co-founders, also husband and wife, met while Neal was acting in a New York City production of "What the Butler Saw."
"A person in the show knew somebody in a school no longer in existence in Long Lake," Neal explained, his words like an opening line in a Beckett play.
"And we brought the show to the school."
Pettee was teaching theater at that school, Adirondack Mountain School in Long Lake.
The nucleus of Pendragon spun loosely as AMS Interplay, a group of actors from the New York show removed to the mountain school.
"When AMS Interplay dissolved, Bob and I decided we had a choice," Neal remembered. "We could go to New York or come to Saranac Lake, which we really liked; this place had a special magic about it. So we went to New York for two weeks."
And they came back.
"We called our friend Fran Yardley and said would you like to do 'A Streetcar Named Desire,'" Neal continued.
It was 1980, the year the company morphed from an acting group company called Sennet.
They held auditions and nobody showed up.
Neal laughed out loud, remembering the wait.
"We went out on the street and grabbed people and brought them in," she said.
"Streetcar" went off in one show with two performances.
VALUABLE COMMODITY
The theater moved to 68 Main St. about three years later and the now-married couple lived upstairs.
In its earliest incarnation, Pettee, Neal and a group of friends did everything.
"Our phone acted as a reservation phone. I remember we would run the box office, put wood in the stove, then run and put a costume on and act," Neal said.
What drew them to the quiet, implausible audience wrapped in mountain lakes and ponds?
And why spend an entire lifetime building one theater?
Neal and Pettee laughed.
"Insanity?" she said.
"Theater is a valuable commodity when you think about the quality of living here," he said.
"These people here have been incredible throughout," she said. "We could not have done this without this community."
The theater was both a child and a third person at the dinner table.
In a generation since, Pendragon, its stage rooted in the mountains, leafed out across New York, drawing new works by acclaimed playwrights and extraordinary actors from around the world.
The theater sends traveling companies to act on other stages and in schools and colleges far from home.
The couple launched New Directions, a series of experimental works, and have premiered plays, winning awards and expanding their theater space.
"We have always committed ourselves to the incredible diversity of theater," Neal said.
Of 30 seasons and several thousand shows, Neal said producing "Angels in America" stood out.
"It is one of the things in 30 years about which I'm most proud."
"Angels" was first staged in San Francisco in 1991, and many theaters in the United States were shut down by church and community for staging it.
Saranac Lake loved it.
"We did really quite well with it," Neal recalled.
CANVAS AND CLOTH
Live theater makes a safe and essential place for cataclysm and political conflict, tragedy, comedy, relief, wit and entertainment — all contained under one roof.
For Pettee, it was harder to choose one standout show.
"Theater is really a fascinating kind of world because it's always different, it's always new," he said. "Even the same play in the same run changes."
Like a river.
"Only you never get to the end of it," Pettee said.
Besides its founders and a vibrant board of directors, Pendragon has a full-time, year-round company of four: set and costume artist Kent Streed; actors Donna Moshek and Brandon Patterson; and technical director John Szasz.
Streed is the artistic mind behind much of the fabric of Pendragon, the canvas and cloth, sequins and textures, glue and paint.
Upstairs, he has a perch behind a bank of sewing machines overlooking gravel alleys that spill onto Lake Flower Avenue.
His arrival at Pendragon was a fluke 20 years ago, he said.
"A friend of mine was supposed to be doing sets and costumes for 'Reckless.' One snowy pre-Christmas day, I was shopping around and he ended up bagging out of the project, and I ended up taking his place. I had a great time working that cold, cold winter. I got to see my first Winter Carnival and learned to love the butterhorns (pastry) at Lakeview Deli. God, they were good. And so, here I am."
LIVE, INTENSE
His studio and stash of costume-alia ring the upper floors around Pendragon's stage.
The costume shop is occupied by several dress forms, one made of vivid green parts stitched with fat, white thread.
A great bunch of patterns are tacked together like a tissue flower on the wall.
Streed had an early reverence for design.
"I was at my Great Aunt Alene's house at age 5. We went up into the attic and she turned on the lights. There was a dress form at the top of the stairs, and it scared me. It was a headless person, for God's sake."
Growing up in Idaho, Streed understood the spark live theater brings to rural community, an explosive blend of art and social interaction.
But at its core, the company members explained, live theater is the actor's edge, that place where a person leaves self behind and steps away.
The audience goes, too.
"Everyone here loves to do what they do. It's almost hard not to get it done right," said Patterson, now in his third season with Pendragon.
"No one is afraid to go there, to not be afraid to make a fool out of themselves."
"There is something incredible about watching a person being embarrassed in front of you," Streed said, "There's a vulnerability and a confidence in it. It's astonishing to watch them give it to you."
"The theater allows it to be real. It's live, it's crackling, it's intense every time," Patterson said of their work.
And there's a new audience the next night.
In 30 years, Pendragon has drawn energy from a cast of hundreds, bringing opportunity to premier playwrights and guest actors, to stagehands, ushers and volunteers, to artists, technical support staff, directors and patrons.
Strands that draw actors to their roles, tie costumes to stage direction and fix lights to the boom are like curtains that open and close.
"Well, in a small town, theater is a network of people that breathes," Pettee said.
E-mail Kim Smith Dedam at: kdedam@pressrepublican.com
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