INTERVIEW: Enter the ‘Burning Cauldron’ with Tony nominee Tom Pecinka
Photo: The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire features Tom Pecinka and Marianne Rendón. Photo courtesy of Carol Roseg / Provided by The Press Room NYC with permission.
NEW YORK — Anne Washburn’s new play, The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, is a enticing head-scratcher that feels like a spiritual cousin of her earlier celebrated work, Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play. In this new tale, audiences follow the goings-on of an intentional community in rural Northern California. They live off the grid, only having one telephone to connect to the outside world, which allows them to focus on family, food, sustainability and agriculture.
Then, someone in the group dies, and this tight-knit community is thrown asunder, with loyalties tested and secrets needing to be buried. Tom Pecinka, a Tony Award nominee for Stereophonic, plays the character of Will, a family member of the person who died, and he wants some answers.
To continue with the plot summary would rob future audience members of the thrill of watching The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, which continues its extended run at the Vineyard Theatre in New York City through Sunday, Dec. 7.
“I think so much of my journey recently has been not only the opportunity and the privilege, but the curiosity of working with the greatest writers that are living, that are working, that are making,” Pecinka said in a recent Zoom interview. “So much of my early career was working on Shakespeare and Chekhov and Ibsen, and the new play world was not a big part of my life.”
That started to change in recent years for Pecinka, when he began auditioning for contemporary works and securing some solid roles. It also helped that he’s always been an admirer of Washburn’s work.
“There are very few playwrights that have a singular voice, a fingerprint on how they write,” he said. “You read an Anne Washburn play or you watch an Anne Washburn play, and there are certain preoccupations, certain world-building that is just definitively her style, that she’s kind of created herself. It’s the type of play that I’ve never really worked on professionally, the way she experiments, the way she evokes mystery, the way she doesn’t spend a lot of her time worrying about providing concrete answers to a lot of things. So when I read the play, I was pretty mystified by the script.”
One of the big positives of playing Will in the show is the simple costume that Pecinka gets to wear. He’s on stage in jeans and comfortable clothes, ditching the period threads he’s played in the past.
“Ultimately I think what attracted me to it was sort of delving into a theatrical world that I have never really had the opportunity to … get to play,” the actor said. “You meet a friend on the street, and you go, ‘Oh, those are nice pants.’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, I got them from that show.’ I’ve never had that opportunity. I always kind of play weird character roles or an era that is not contemporary, so to just play a guy in jeans, kind of a nice leather jacket, and has a very specific way of entering the play, I was attracted to that.”
The role of Will — without giving away any spoilers — is an interesting one for the fabric of the narrative. He’s clearly the outsider of the show, having discovered this commune in the woods, and that outsider feeling carried over into the rehearsal room with director Steve Cosson.
“I did feel like an outsider in the rehearsal room, not in a bad way, but in a way that the rest of the cast are primarily members of this commune, and so there’s a specific language that they use,” Pecinka said. “There’s a specific sort of topics that they’re talking about that my character is really not concerned about. My character is concerned about finding somebody, and that’s the main drive of what he’s doing.”
He added: “Will is kind of a chameleon. He kind of goes into this community and tries to really charm them and really tries to role-play to them in the way that you can, but I think he also challenges them at specific moments. So I think a lot of my job with Will was kind of figuring out this one character, what’s his life, what’s his world. The world of the commune in the play is very specific, and I think very evocative, but the world of Will, I had a good imaginative process of creating that for myself. And again he’s a man on a mission.”
One engaging and fascinatingly frustrating attribute of the play is how motivations remain secret for the entire two-hour-plus running time. Everyone seems so nice, yet everyone seems so close to an unseen edge. Pecinka offered some interpretation of his character’s specific trajectory, opening the door wide enough to take a peek inside.
“You’re on a search for another human being, but what if your opinions of that human being are not completely positive,” the actor asked. “It’s like, you’ve got to find this person. You’re on a search and a mission to find someone that maybe you don’t like very much. I think you love them. They’re a family member of this person, and you love them. But it’s also complicated. … We all have that one or two family members that maybe we don’t get along with that great. So, what if they went missing, and it was your mission to find them. How would you feel? How would you approach it?”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, featuring Tom Pecinka, continues through Sunday, Dec. 7, at the Vineyard Theatre in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
