Their Son, the Producer

Logically, you know it has to be--but somehow, you just don’t think of Sean Penn as having parents. You imagine him suddenly materializing in Los Angeles in the mid-’80s, full-grown and dangerous, just in time to punch out a photographer for trying to shoot a picture of Madonna.

But here it is, the touching family portrait: actress Eileen Ryan, 69, Sean’s mother; actor-director Leo Penn, 76, Sean’s father; and Sean, 37--all gathered at the Culver City offices of Sean Penn’s production company, Clyde Is Hungry, to talk about a new family project: “Remembrance,” a drama by Irish playwright Graham Reid, starring Eileen and Leo and executive-produced by Sean and Clyde Is Hungry in association with Helicon Theatre Company. It opens Friday at the Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles.

Of course, this is not exactly a scene from “The Waltons,” with an edgy Sean Penn chain-smoking and bouncing in and out of his chair, railing about the sorry state of theater in Los Angeles, while his wisecracking parents talk about their roller-coaster lives as actors. Their years in the business include Leo Penn’s decade on the Hollywood blacklist in the 1940s and ‘50s, the result of attending meetings of actors sympathetic to Hollywood trade union members and occasionally speaking out at meetings in support of the Hollywood Ten.

Also somewhat outside the norm was the Malibu neighborhood where Sean and his brothers--musician Michael, 39, and actor Chris, 31--grew up shooting their own movies with buddies such as Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen (“God help him!” Leo Penn says of the troubled Sheen, rolling his eyes).

But the dedication to theater--as exemplified by this play, the story of a 68-year-old British Protestant former soldier and a 63-year-old Catholic widow who fall in love in the Belfast cemetery where each has buried a son--is definitely a family affair.

Sean is usually loath to sit still for interviews but is willing to do so in support of this project, his first outing producing theater. “It’s rare that you find a love story for people over 40,” he says. At the beginning of the interview, however, Sean warns that his cooperativeness tends to be fleeting and that he remains prone to walking out in a huff: “It’s still early,” he says with a growl, only half-joking.

The elder Penns say they’ve received nothing but support from their son, who in turn calls his parents “great actors” as well as a “great inspiration” to him and his brothers. “Here is the beginning of something. We’re thinking of starting a theater,” Sean offers.

Sean is fresh from a best actor nod at Cannes for his role in John Cassavetes’ film “She’s So Lovely”; he also stars with Michael Douglas in “The Game,” and his most recent film, Oliver Stone’s “U-Turn,” opens in October. Still, he has this to say about the film industry: “There’s no acting being done in movies . . . you might as well be talking about a grocer versus an actor in most cases, a personality selling a product, which is just not going to hold up on the stage. . . . You can do that in movies, with images and effects, but you can’t do it on the stage.”

The play’s director, Veronica Brady, brought “Remembrance” to Ryan and Leo Penn, who in turn took it to their son, who agreed to produce it. They discovered the rights to the play were already owned by a trio of actresses--Melissa Fitzgerald, Robin Lange and Laura Jane Salvato. They decided to collaborate, and the three are now in the cast, which also includes James Gandolfini.

Sean Penn describes his role of producer as minimal--”I’m the mayonnaise in the sandwich”--but through his efforts, Sinead O’Connor signed on to compose original music for the play with Joseph Vitarelli, who composed the music for “She’s So Lovely.” O’Connor performs the recorded music, written in an ancient Irish a cappella style called sean-nos (pronounced shuh-NO).

“It’s like getting married again, renewing your vows,” says the white-haired, elfin Leo Penn of falling in love with his real-life wife for the first time onstage. “It’s misleading to say it’s a geriatric ‘Romeo and Juliet’--but it is.”

Despite Sean’s surly reputation, his parents describe him as a “good son” with a strong social conscience, misrepresented by his sometimes violent reaction to the press. “He was married to Madonna, for Christ’s sake,” Ryan exclaims. “They would just jump out from behind something, he didn’t know whether they had a gun in their hand or what--that started the whole thing. . . . I think it hurt Sean a great deal, that time. And Sean is very shy. Of the three boys, Mike and Chris were extroverted, but Sean was shy.”

Adds Leo: “In school, they used to call him Gary Cooper, because all he said was ‘yup’ and ‘nope.’ ”

Ryan describes Sean as a true actor, uncomfortable with the attendant role of movie star. Unlike some young actors, she said, Sean was never concerned about making sure he was photographed from his good side. “When he was doing [the 1985 film] ‘The Falcon and the Snowman,’ I was always telling him, ‘You don’t have to do all that stuff to your teeth and your nose, making yourself ugly. Just act the part,’ ” she says.

“Anyway, [later] I got a call from Sean. He said, ‘I want you to come over, I need to see you. There’s somebody I want you to meet.’ I thought that was odd, but I drove there. This guy came out of the house, he looked vaguely familiar--I thought maybe he was a friend from Sean’s high school. Sean keeps a lot of friends from high school.

“The guy came out and said: ‘Hi, Mrs. Penn!’ I said: ‘Hi, how are you, is Sean here?’ So we were talking for about five minutes, and he said: ‘You don’t remember me, do you, Mrs. Penn?’ I said, ‘You look familiar. . . . You’re my son! Damn you!’ ” she says and laughs heartily. “He’d done the whole makeup. He sure made his point!”

Ryan and Leo Penn note that they never pushed their children into show biz. “I would never have driven my kids to anything,” Ryan says.

“You drove them to Little League,” quips Leo.

“I just wanted them to be fulfilled in whatever they decided to do,” Ryan continues. “[My mother] thought it was crazy for me to become an actress--at that time, it was just one inch better than deciding to become a prostitute. That was a dreadful thing.”

The couple--who met when cast in leading roles in a late-1950s Broadway production of “The Iceman Cometh,” when Leo Penn took over the role vacated by Jason Robards--shared a philosophy of fostering independence in their children. And they have clearly maintained creative lives independently of their famous offspring.

Independence, in fact, is the reason Ryan says she only wanted sons. After 25 hours of unmedicated labor, she gave birth to first son Michael in 1958, and “I said, if it’s a girl, push her back in--I’m not going through this for any woman!” she says. (“She always did have a sense of drama,” deadpans Leo.)

“I think it was because my father was traditional, Italian, and believed that the woman gets married and stays home and that’s that,” Ryan continues. “I wanted to have men children, able to do what they wanted to do. I went for some anesthesia the next time.”

Ryan, a native New Yorker, made the choice to give up a flourishing Broadway career to raise her sons, not reentering the field until cast member Sean helped her land a role in the 1986 film “At Close Range.” But she has always devoted time to creative endeavors, including writing, sculpting and painting. “She’s my Renaissance pain in the ass,” Leo observes, with affection.

And Ryan recently sold to HBO a screenplay she has had tucked away in a drawer for years: “Bloodlines,” an autobiographical drama about three generations of women--including a character based on her own mother, an alcoholic. “It was very therapeutic to write this script--very painful and therapeutic,” she says. Ryan has decided to write the role of the husband out of the script and just focus on the women. “I may kill him, I may have him out of town, whatever,” she says crisply. “There goes my part,” moans Leo.

Leo Penn launched his acting career at UCLA, where he studied drama and expected to teach someday. Instead, after performing in a play on campus, Hollywood came calling. By 1945 he was signed to a studio contract with Paramount--but it was not renewed due to the blacklist.

“But I was told the reason I was under contract in the first place was that Alan Ladd, who was a short actor, refused to do a movie, and they put him on suspension--and they signed me, another short actor, as a threat,” he says, grinning.

Leo Penn survived the blacklist mostly by doing television work; his movie career finally recovered when he was offered a role with Rita Hayworth and Gig Young in “Story on Page One,” directed by Clifford Odets. Ironically, through a chance meeting with Odets’ sister in a restaurant, Penn had just learned that it was Odets who turned over his name to the congressional committees responsible for authoring the blacklist. Guilt may have prompted Odets’ call. “And there went all my integrity!” Penn jokes. “That feature bought us our first house.”

Reentering Hollywood, however, made Penn realize he was tired of acting. “I looked young for my age, and I was tired of being cast as baby-faced killers,” he says. “I had directed one play, off-Broadway, and thought I might like to direct.”

Through a friend, he was able to wangle his way onto the set of a then-new TV series called “Ben Casey” to learn the ropes as a director--and soon worked his way up from a jack-of-all-trades, rewriting scenes or whatever was needed, to directing episodes of the show. “I’ve been a happy gypsy ever since,” Penn says.

He continues to direct series television but says TV is not as much fun as it used to be. “Whether that has to do with faulty memory, or age, I don’t know--but you didn’t have the network involved so much, you had individual sponsors, who did little in the way of interfering. You also had more time to tell the story--53 minutes [without ads] instead of 46,” he says.

While it’s been decades since they’ve been onstage together, the husband and wife say they are up to the challenge. “As a matter of fact, it’s easier, because we can take advantage of certain elements of our lives. Two actors arriving as strangers don’t have that,” Leo Penn observes.

“Remembrance” director Brady says that, despite their years away from the stage, the Penns have nothing to worry about. “They obviously have a great relationship, but their kind of acting is also very different from modern acting--their kind of training, their experiences, their point of view,” she muses. “There is just a lot of magical, magical talent. The children didn’t get it from the wind.”

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* “Remembrance,” Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd. Opens Friday. Regular schedule: Thursdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Nov. 2. $20. (310) 477-2055.