Or Not to Be . . .

Remembering Christopher Pennock (1944-2021)

By Steven Leigh Morris

Idyllwild’s local newspaper The Town Crier, reported last week that actor Christopher Pennock had died. He was 76. Chris was a very good actor, on Broadway in 1967 in The Rose Tattoo and A Patriot for Me, before being contracted to the soap opera, Dark Shadows. He also appeared on General Hospital, Baywatch and Melrose Place, and countless other television shows, and in the 1982 movie Frances, opposite Jessica Lange. He was a lifetime member of The Actors Studio.

I write this as a kind of memory, because in 2004, Chris played Claudius in what remains the worst production of Hamlet I’ve ever seen. Chris knew it was awful. All the actors knew it. The production was a vanity production at what used to be the Tamarind Theatre on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, financed by and starring a Greek immigrant named Francesco Vitali. The Tamarind was an 85-seat venue. For his Hamlet there, Vitali took out ads that ran on 12 billboards across the city – for just one that loomed over the Sunset Strip, the price tag was $35,000 — and on Metro buses, featuring Vitali’s face kissing Yorick’s skull. After scathing reviews in LA Weekly and the LA Times, the production closed after two performances.

The problem was not just that Vitali’s ambition exceeded his talent, which is not really so terrible a breach. How can one ever assess the limitations or the excesses of something as undefinable as talent? The problem was that for week after week of rehearsal, Vitali never showed up. It was rumored he had holed up in a hotel to memorize his lines. And when he did show up, about 10 days before the production was slated to open, he still didn’t know most of his lines. And those that he did know were incomprehensible. Even his fellow actors such as Chris, who knew the play inside out, couldn’t understand a word he was saying.   

For an article I wrote about the debacle in LA Weekly, Chris and I got to know each other. He even contributed sketches he drew of scenes from rehearsal. His sketches accompanied the article. Here’s what he told me then:

“I was so exhausted because I live in Idyllwild [a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Hollywood, when the roads are clear]. I have a wife and kid. They offered to put me up in some millionaire hotel. It turned out to be a motel near Hollywood and La Brea with these strange fumes. I was choking in there, so I open the window, and staring back at me is a billboard of Francesco’s Hamlet.”

Chris described in detail the screaming, invective-filled fights between Vitali and the show’s director, Aaron Mullen, that escalated to the brink of punches. Mullen stormed out of the project, and then returned, lured back by a pay raise.

Chris had arrived late in the rehearsal process, recommended by his friend from The Actors Studio, Claudia Stedelin, who played Gertrude. “I tried to leave six or seven times, Chris told me, “but they kept bringing me back in. Claudia would say, ‘Come on, we can do this, and if you quit, I’ll quit.’”

But there was more to this portrait of loyalty than meets the eye, Chris explained.

They were all waiting for the arrival of George Clooney and Steven Soderberg, and their Section 8 Production Company, which rented the theater on Monday nights. Hope is such an eternal motivator and sadist. And indeed, the superstar movie producers showed up. They needed a scene from local theater for a half-reality/half-scripted project they were developing for HBO, and they offered to pay the actors in Hamlet $115 for extra work, to film one of their rehearsals. The actor playing Polonius refused to participate. He said he could tell from the way they were filming the rehearsal that their aim was to lampoon it.  Not true, co-executive producer Grant Heslov told me at the time.

When I moved to the forest of Idyllwild a few years ago, Chris was still living up here, and we reconnected, mostly on Facebook. “Hey Villagers!” his posts usually began. He loved to hike with his dogs. He had a fan base in Idyllwild. He was a lifelong Buddhist and member of KML (Idyllwild Dharma Center). He was as gregarious as he was kind. As an example of his generosity, the Idyllwild Library hosted a book-reading and play-reading of works I’d written, and Chris showed up to both, even though we weren’t particularly close.

At each event, I remember his ruddy complexion and radiant smile. We laughed about that Hamlet and gulped sandwiches side by side. We promised each other we’d get together for coffee. We never did. And now we can’t — something to keep in mind as the world spins ever-faster on its axis, and we all struggle to keep our balance.