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Joe Pintauro, Playwright Who Had Been a Priest, Dies at 87

Joe Pintauro, who made the unusual career switch from priest to playwright and whose works were staged by the Circle Repertory Company in New York and numerous regional theaters, died May 29 at his home in Sag Harbor, New York. He was 87.

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By
NEIL GENZLINGER
, New York Times

Joe Pintauro, who made the unusual career switch from priest to playwright and whose works were staged by the Circle Repertory Company in New York and numerous regional theaters, died May 29 at his home in Sag Harbor, New York. He was 87.

His husband, Greg Therriault, said the cause was prostate cancer.

Pintauro’s plays addressed a broad range of topical subjects, including the AIDS crisis, pederasty in the priesthood and suburban sprawl.

In 1992, his “Men’s Lives” was the first main stage production of the new Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor and dealt with a controversy right outside the theater’s doors: the tension between sport fishermen and the baymen who continued to struggle to make a living with traditional fishing methods. It was a work whose themes might have resonated anyplace where coal miners, shoemakers or autoworkers were being put out of work by forces beyond their control.

“When men of craft and artistry are mistreated and wiped out or laid off in record numbers by the capitalistic monster, leaving workers and their skills in the dust of profit over everything, the artist must make a statement,” Pintauro told The New York Times in advance of that production.

Joseph Thomas Pintauro was born on Nov. 22, 1930, in New York City. His father, Aniello, was a cabinetmaker, and his mother, Carmela (Iovino) Pintauro, was a homemaker.

Pintauro grew up in Queens, where he attended John Adams High School, and in East Northport, on Long Island, New York. At Manhattan College in the Bronx, where he earned a bachelor’s degree, he studied business and marketing but also nurtured an interest in writing, contributing articles to the college’s newspaper and poetry to its quarterly journal.

The college, a Roman Catholic institution, was his first exposure to Catholic schooling, and he arrived there at a particularly emotional point.

“I doubt if I would have taken any interest in theology,” he told The East Hampton Star in 2001, “but, while at school, my mother was dying. I was 21 and I wanted to know everything that the theologians had to say about it. I wanted it all to be true, God to be there, life eternal.”

By the time he graduated in 1953 he had decided to become a priest. He enrolled in St. Jerome’s College (now St. Jerome’s University) in Ontario, Canada, receiving a degree in philosophy and Latin, and then went through Our Lady of Angels Seminary at Niagara University. He was ordained in Brooklyn in 1958.

He was assigned to parishes in the Flatbush and then Williamsburg sections of Brooklyn at a time when unemployment, gangs and drugs, not gentrification, were the issues of the day.

On his days off from his priestly duties, he pursued his writing interests, joining in the Circle in the Square Theater drama workshop in Greenwich Village and workshops on poetry and cinema at Columbia University; at the same time, he was also studying for a master’s in American literature at Fordham University.

By the mid-1960s Pintauro was growing restless in the priesthood and asked his bishop for permission to seek a job in the secular world. The request was granted in 1966 — the Official Catholic Directory changed his listing to “absent on leave” — and he landed a job at the advertising agency Ted Bates.

He worked on campaigns for Trans World Airlines and Kool cigarettes. A 1967 feature article about him in The Times ran under the headline “Parish Priest to Copy Writer.” He later moved to Young and Rubicam.

He also became a published poet; his 1968 volume, “To Believe in God,” illustrated by Sister Mary Corita Kent, sold particularly well and brought him a burst of renown that included television appearances.

“I sort of just tasted fame, like a little cinnamon flavor on the tongue,” Pintauro said years later, “but it was so unearned and accidental, I didn’t fall for it.”

In the 1970s, having lost his advertising job and having had his priestly status withdrawn by the church, he moved to a property he had bought in Sag Harbor to “stop, look around and decide what I really wanted to do with my life.” He turned to writing full time.

His novel “Cold Hands” was published in 1979. In 1982 Circle Rep staged his play “Snow Orchid,” about a family in turmoil, with a cast that included Peter Boyle and Olympia Dukakis. The company opened its fall season in 1989 with his drama “Beside Herself,” with William Hurt, Lois Smith and Calista Flockhart in the cast.

“The Dead Boy” (1990) was about a church sex scandal and has had readings or productions all over the United States and abroad. Pintauro addressed the grim reality of AIDS in “Raft of the Medusa” (1991), whose title invoked the Théodore Géricault painting of the aftermath of a shipwreck, a raft full of the dead and the living.

“The painting is an apt metaphor for those who have been struck by AIDS,” Mel Gussow wrote in The Times, reviewing a production at the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. “The difference, as expressed in Joe Pintauro’s play ‘Raft of the Medusa,’ is that the survivors will also succumb.”

The Bay Street Theater produced other works by Pintauro after “Men’s Lives.” In 1995 it commissioned three short plays, one each written by Pintauro, Lanford Wilson and Terrence McNally, featuring the same three actors on a beach at different times of the day. The title was “By the Sea, by the Sea, by the Beautiful Sea.”

“While Mr. Pintauro may be the playwright of least renown among the stellar company,” Alvin Klein wrote in The Times, “his is the most tautly drawn work of the three.”

Pintauro and Therriault, his partner of 40 years, married in 2013. He leaves no other immediate survivors. In a 2009 interview with Hamptons.com in advance of a production of one of his last plays, “Cathedral,” Pintauro was asked about the influence of his first career, the priesthood, on his much longer writing career. It was something he didn’t like to dwell on.

“I’m talking about someone else, or so it feels,” he said. “It’s rather unbelievable at this point in my life. Still, it’s like a flag sticking out of my ear. It doesn’t go away.”

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