Drama: An Actor's Education

by John Lithgow

  My mother and father dutifully showed up at school for Parents’ Night, halfway through the fall semester. Afterwards, with hilarity shot through with guilt, Mom described their parent-teacher conference. Mr. Troy had kept the meeting short and to the point. Forgoing any introductory remarks, he had simply exclaimed, “Get him out of here!”

  That December, I went to a school dance in the gymnasium. By this time, I had managed to work my way into the good graces of the seventh-grade Oak Bluffs “in” crowd (such as it was). I had accomplished this mainly by befriending the brawny, black-leather-jacketed class tough, Ashley DePriest, and by accepting his offer of my first cigarette. I got along fine, too, with the loud, raunchy girls who turned up the heat in all the flirty sexual interactions of our class. But although my hormones were approaching the boiling point, I was still the shy new kid in town and nowhere near secure enough to act on even the most chaste of my impulses.

  So imagine my astonishment at the school dance when scrawny, bespectacled, and wildly sexy Ruthie Legg attacked me from behind, wrapped her arms around me, planted a moist, lipsticked kiss on my neck, and then ran back to a shrieking gaggle of girls, having made good on a dare. A glandular explosion erupted inside me. A breathtaking revelation almost caused me to faint: I was the object of a group crush! Impossible but true! I was attractive! Maybe life in Oak Bluffs was not the cold, barren tundra I had made it out to be.

  Two weeks after this intoxicating episode, I was gone. The Lithgow family abruptly packed up and left Martha’s Vineyard behind them. Unbeknownst to me, my parents had sold our house and engineered our next move. We were heading to a small town on the Maumee River in northern Ohio, a move just as bewildering as the one before. I never saw any of my Oak Bluffs classmates again. None of them, that is, except one.

  A crazy-quilt history like mine generates some astonishing coincidences. Fifteen years after my strange Martha’s Vineyard adventure, I found myself in New York City, a twenty-six-year-old unemployed actor, married, with a six-month-old baby boy. A friend invited me to direct two plays in a summer-stock theater he had founded a year before. The theater was situated in the gymnasium of the public school in the town of Oak Bluffs, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. Stunned by the coincidence, and grateful for any work at all, I accepted. As I walked into that gym, utterly unchanged in all those years, I headed straight for the spot where Ruthie Legg had jumped me from behind. I stood there for a long moment, savoring the rich, exquisitely painful irony of life.

  On the day I left Martha’s Vineyard, having finished my work on both of my shows, I sat with my wife and baby in the Black Dog Tavern in Vineyard Haven, waiting for the ferry to the mainland. During my month on the island, I had searched the faces of everyone I passed, hoping to catch sight of one of those long-lost classmates from Mr. Troy’s seventh grade. I had spotted no one. But on this morning, looking across the tables of the Black Dog, I recognized a large man in a mechanic’s monkey suit leaning over a cup of coffee. He had greasy blond hair combed into a fifties-style ducktail. He smoked a cigarette. Except for a droopy mustache, he had not changed in fifteen years. I walked over to him.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but aren’t you Ashley?”

  Silence.

  “Ashley DePriest?”

  “Yuh.”

  “This is incredible. I’m John. John Lithgow. You gave me my first cigarette.”

  More silence.

  “From Mr. Troy’s class. Seventh grade, remember? With Debbie DeBetancourt? Denny Gonsalves? Ruthie Legg?”

  Ashley DePriest looked at me with bleary blue eyes, expressionless.

  “I remember all of them. But I don’t remember you.”

  Not remember!? How was that possible? Had all of these people, so vivid in my memory, retained no image of me at all? Had I simply slipped in and out of their lives, a forgettable minor player? Had Ruthie Legg forgotten, too? For the first four months of seventh grade, I had desperately struggled to overcome my fear, to assert myself, to fit in. In my own mind, I had been a nervous, untested young actor, gradually winning over his toughest crowd. That morning, Ashley DePriest was my most dismissive critic. I had been completely unmemorable.

  [3]

  Lachryphobia

  As I recall it, the drive from downtown Toledo to the town of Waterville takes about a half hour. There were five of us in the car when I first took that short trip. My father, my mother, and my baby sister were escorting my big sister and me to our first day of school. It was halfway through the school year, and Robin and I were sick with anxiety. The January day was clear but brutally cold, with gusts of snow snapping across the flat, brown fields. By some innate wizardry, my mother had managed to secure yet another big house for us to live in, but we couldn’t move into it just yet. For now we were billeted in a Toledo hotel, hence the January commute. On the radio, Buddy Holly was singing “Peggy Sue.” I remember listening with intense concentration, mentally reassuring myself. “I know this song,” I thought. “I’ll have something in common with them.”

  So began the next chapter of the cockeyed story of my teenage years. My father was attempting to relaunch his summer Shakespeare Festival in a new setting. This time, the actors would perform in the outdoor Toledo Zoo Amphitheatre, where, in years past, the Antioch company had made frequent guest appearances, to the roars of lions and the shrieks of peacocks. He had five months to gear up for the summer season, and the sleepy town of Waterville was to be our bedroom community.

  Joining a second seventh-grade class was bad enough. But joining it in the middle of the year was horrific. The small measure of confidence I had achieved in Oak Bluffs had vanished. My twelve-year-old’s self-esteem had dropped to zero. I felt like I had been sent back to square one. In retrospect, my situation was hardly the stuff of a severe childhood trauma. There was nothing to fear from my cheerful, milk-fed new classmates, many of them sturdy farm kids with names like Weimer, Marcinek, Scheiderer, and Hiltabiddle. But I was terrified nonetheless. The causes were twofold: I was desperately afraid I would burst into tears (which occurred five or six times in the first week) and that someone would notice one of my inexplicable erections (which occurred every twenty minutes). I was a mess.

  The fear of tears was a real problem. Call it lachryphobia. I simply couldn’t get to the end of a day without crying, and every time it happened I was mortified with embarrassment. For example, I recall a halting conversation with a pleasant fellow named Denny Bucher across our lunch trays in the school cafeteria. In an act of almost corny kindliness, he asked me what Santa Claus had brought me for Christmas. His simple solicitude opened a floodgate of maudlin self-pity in me. I exploded with sobs in front of everyone, spilling tears and snot all over my chipped beef and biscuits.

  By an uncanny maternal intuition, my mother sensed what was going on. Her response was swift and pragmatic. Behind the scenes, she arranged for me to simply walk home for lunch every day. Fortified by that daily half hour at our own kitchen table, I gradually got my sea legs and once again began to adapt. My first full day of school with no tears was a pathetically small victory, but a victory nonetheless. Within weeks I had collected a few friends, unveiled my nascent sense of humor, and put my days of lachryphobic geekiness behind me. As the winter weather gradually gave way to spring, my spirits continued to improve. Just as I had blended in with the deracinated young delinquents of Oak Bluffs, I now joined the wholesome ranks of Waterville’s backyard boys and girls: riding bikes, flying kites, and playing intense rounds of kick-the-can until nightfall. I even spent weeks building a bright-red ersatz Soap Box Derby racer. My friends and I pushed each other around in it, up and down the leafy sidewalks of Waterville, hour after idle hour on end.

  One evening that spring my father had something to show us. He had worked all day on a brochure to announce his upcoming summer season of plays. Using pen and ink, he had hand-lettered all the information in the brochure and created ink drawings to illustrate it. The drawings depicted scenes
from each of five plays–The Tempest, Charley’s Aunt, The Devil’s Disciple, Ah, Wilderness!, and something called Pictures in the Hallway, billed as “a new play” adapted from the prose writings of Sean O’Casey. Dad was visibly proud of his own handiwork, and I recall being pretty impressed by it, too. I don’t remember the slightest concern that the brochure looked cheap and amateurish. But in retrospect I can picture it vividly, and it did.

  That evening, I didn’t think to ask myself any of the questions that seem so obvious to me now. Why was my father making his own brochure? Why was he doing it on the kitchen table? Why did my mother have that anxious, skeptical look on her face? Why was there only one Shakespeare play included among the five offerings? And why were the plays going to be presented in the small indoor theater adjoining the Zoo Amphitheatre, and not in the huge Amphitheatre itself? And the biggest question of all didn’t even occur to me: “Is anything wrong?”

  There was plenty wrong. But, typically, my parents shared none of it with their kids. Years later, when my father was an old man, he told me the events of that year from his point of view. I finally learned what he and my mother had so expertly kept from me while it was actually going on.

  Originally, the summer season was to be sponsored in large part by Toledo’s major newspaper, The Blade. Assured of their backing, Dad had posted an “Equity bond” and had engaged a company of actors, signing their contracts himself. Almost all of these actors were friends and veterans of his former Shakespeare Festival. The new festival was to be precisely modeled on the old one, even using its distinctive unit stage design. Continuity was everything. He planned to capitalize on the reputation of the old festival and retain its huge following, both in Ohio and in neighboring states.

  As it happened, my father relied too heavily on his own optimism and the good faith of his backers. To his shock and dismay, The Blade withdrew its funding, but too late for him to cancel the season. He was trapped, both by legal obligations and loyalty to his long-time troupe of actors. With a fraction of his projected budget and a stack of signed contracts on file, he had to come up with an alternative plan in a matter of days, and it had to be cheap. Hence the smaller theater, the shorter list of plays, and the tacky brochure on the kitchen table. The season went forward, and if memory serves, the shows were pretty good. But nobody came. By mid-August, my father’s last-minute summer theater festival was a slowly unfolding catastrophe. But as the clouds gathered, I was blithely oblivious. My summer days were spent swimming at the quarry outside of town, and my evenings were devoted to playing third base for the Indians of the Waterville Little League.

  Not once did I notice, even for a second, that both my parents had been seized by desperate panic. As Dad told the story in old age, the acute anxiety of those days still had the power to unsettle him. The fact was that by the end of that summer, he was in serious trouble. As a manager and businessman, he had always been vague and haphazard. But this time, with no one to look after the books, his negligence had caught up with him. In struggling to keep the company afloat, he had played fast and loose with payroll taxes. The season was drawing to a close. The festival was a washout. My parents were broke. Creditors were clamoring. Auditors were converging. In a nightmare scenario, Dad saw himself frogwalked to prison by the Feds, leaving his penniless family behind him.

  At this juncture, a deus ex machina appeared in the form of a man named Hans Maeder. Maeder was the cheerfully despotic German headmaster of The Stockbridge School. This was a boarding school near Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the town where I had spent fifth grade. My brother David was just about to graduate from the school, having lived there for the previous three years (hence avoiding the mad vicissitudes of our recent moves). Out of the blue, Herr Maeder offered my father a job teaching English and drama. He even threw in a spousal appointment for my mom as a school librarian.

  For my panicky parents, this dual offer was a lifesaver. They accepted it, but not before huddling with the Toledo festival’s legal counsel. This man assured my father that he would find a way to clean up the financial mess that Dad had left behind. But at the same time, he urged Dad to get out of town as fast as he could. And so, as if grabbing the caboose railing on the last train out of the state, we loaded up our black Studebaker sedan and sped away.

  For the second time in a year, I left behind a hard-won community of friends whom I would never see again. But this time, the change would be less of an adjustment, and far less wrenching. In Stockbridge, I would rejoin my old fifth-grade class from three years before. Familiar teachers, schoolmates, playmates, and crushes were all there, waiting for me, three years older. This would not be so bad.

  Try as I may, I can’t picture the moment when my parents announced this most recent disruption. I can’t recall my reaction to the news, nor my emotional state of mind as we watched Waterville disappear in the rearview mirror. But I can guess. I imagine that I was not so fearful this time, not so confused, not so resentful. I was heading back to Stockbridge, a world I knew and liked. And Waterville, like Oak Bluffs before it, represented a modest personal triumph, a hurdle I had cleared, a battlefield where, thirteen years old, I had emerged unscathed. I suspect that I felt pretty good. I was getting better at this.

  [4]

  The Good Boy

  After Oak Bluffs and Waterville, the world of The Stockbridge School was distinctly exotic. This was not your typical New England prep school, full of children of great wealth and patrician breeding. Oh no. With its renegade faculty and its raffish student body, The Stockbridge School was just the opposite. Its kids were roughly divided into two groups. Half were lefty New Yorkers, many of them Jewish and many of them children of divorce. The other half was a polyglot mix of foreign students, in keeping with Hans Maeder’s internationalist mission (the United Nations flag flew alongside Old Glory at the school’s entrance). An ultra-liberal, ultra-casual atmosphere prevailed. Dress codes were nonexistent. Every teacher was called by his or her first name. Folk ballads and union songs filled the air. The eighty-plus students were made to feel a part of a huge, mutually supportive family, in many cases replacing the fractured families they had left behind. The school shut down many years ago, unable to survive after the messianic Hans departed the scene. But while it lasted, it was an artsy, outdoorsy, gloriously anarchic mess of a place. In all of its years of existence, its most notable alumnus by far was Arlo Guthrie.

  Although nestled in the Berkshire Hills in a splendid New England setting, the school was far from lavish. Serviceable cinderblock classroom buildings and dorms surrounded the large, white-shingled “Main House.” The Lithgow family was housed in a tiny converted icehouse, painted gray with blue trim. This time, there were only four of us—my mother, father, three-year-old Sarah Jane, and me. David was at college now and Robin was enrolled, tuition-free, in the school’s tenth grade, a boarding-school student a hundred yards from home. Hans wanted me to enroll, too. The school started in ninth grade, so he insisted that I skip a year and join the incoming ninth-graders. I demurred. I was worried about being a year younger than the rest of my class, and my parents shared my misgivings. Besides, I wanted to reconnect with my old gang at the public school in town, a half hour away by school bus. Hans was a hard man to refuse, but I managed somehow.

  Though merely a faculty brat, I immersed myself in the quotidian life of the campus. The family ate most of our meals in the community dining hall in the Main House; I knew every student by name and befriended several of them; on Saturdays I tagged along on the students’ “free days,” traveling by bus to Pittsfield for burgers and movies; I rooted for the school soccer team, at matches played amidst the dazzling autumn foliage; I painted scenery for my father’s wildly ambitious school production of Peer Gynt; and on Wednesday nights I attended an extracurricular crafts class run by a genius teacher named Bill Copperthwaite. From Bill I learned how to stitch leather bags, carve wooden bowls, and build furniture, skills which, though they lie dormant, I have retained ever s
ince. All of this made me a de facto student of The Stockbridge School, even though most of its genuine students regarded me as little more than an eager, omnipresent mascot.

  But all of this activity and bonhomie constituted only one-half of my schizophrenic Stockbridge existence. The other half was that of a Stockbridge townie. After the tearful transitions of the preceding year, starting eighth grade at my former school was a cakewalk. Everything was familiar. No real adjustment was necessary. And, as spotty as my education had been until then, I was a perfectly good student. Three years before, as a cowering fifth-grader, I had been terrified of the burly, glowering, red-faced eighth-grade teacher, Mr. Blair. But having become his student, I now found him colorful, crusty, and endearing. Despite his gruff demeanor, I won him over in no time and swiftly assumed the status of teacher’s pet.

  That first day, when I strode into class, my old friends were surprised and delighted, welcoming me back into the fold like the Prodigal Son. They were great guys—Vincent Flynn, Billy Sheridan, Peter Van Lund—and we picked up exactly where we had left off. In a replay of my fifth-grade year, the quaint town and its surroundings provided the setting for all kinds of adventures. In the autumn we climbed to the top of Laurel Mountain and explored the caves of the mysterious “Icy Glen”; when winter descended, we hiked in deep snow and skated on remote lakes and ponds; and in the spring, on the first day of fishing season, we rose before dawn and staked out a perfect spot on the banks of the Stockbridge Bowl, an impossibly picturesque lake in the heart of the Berkshires. The girls were pretty great, too. And although in matters of the heart I was still hopelessly shy, my fantasy life was vivid and feverish. A sweet girl named Carol Lowe, the object of an ardent fifth-grade infatuation, was still there, as dewy as ever.