Drama: An Actor's Education

by John Lithgow

  “Ambassadors from Harry, King of England, do crave admittance to your majesty!”

  It was my first line spoken onstage as a grown-up actor.

  Although I regarded this as another stunning success, I knew very well that I was on the lowliest rung of the company hierarchy. At the topmost rung was our acknowledged leading player. This was a splendid actor named Donald Moffat. His roles in the four plays included Richard II, the Chorus in Henry V, and a poignant and hilarious Justice Shallow in Henry IV, part 2. Donald was a thirty-year-old Englishman from the West Country, trained at RADA, and transplanted to New York with an actress wife, a gamine four-year-old daughter, and a baby boy. In the years following that summer, he grew to be a major actor in New York theater and a familiar face on screen (he played LBJ in the film of The Right Stuff). Nowadays he has slipped gracefully into retirement, embracing an old actor’s obscurity with dignity and contentment.

  In those days, Donald was a striking young man, a British edition of the young Max von Sydow. He had a rangy frame, a long face, penetrating eyes, and a soft voice. In a company of actors who relied on high energy and bluff athleticism, he was the quiet center of the storm, commanding the stage with poetic simplicity. He was quick-witted and intelligent, a man of uncompromising taste, with a warm smile and a stealthy sense of humor. Best of all, he was reflexively curious about all sorts of people and things outside the insular world of theater. From the moment we met, he took a bemused interest in me, especially in my precocious commitment to art. Such an interest was enormously flattering to a fourteen-year-old. I instantly put him on a pedestal and secretly made him my mentor. In the next few years, theater gradually seduced me away from art. I suspect this would never have happened if my father had never hired Donald Moffat.

  For all its glories, the Shakespeare Festival’s tenure at Stan Hywet was a flash in the pan. Following a familiar pattern, my father found himself on unsteady ground as the executive director of Stan Hywet Hall. After the close of the festival season, he soon learned that not everybody was pleased with its success. It became clear that half the members of the board of directors had vastly different priorities for Stan Hywet than my father did. These men and women were pillars of wealthy Akron society. They did not see Stan Hywet as a center for arts and culture. In their eyes it was a historic landmark, a museum, a garden center, a symbol of Akron’s lost splendors, and a shrine to F. A. Seiberling. An outdoor Shakespeare festival, no matter how successful, had no place in their grand design. Massive lighting towers on the back terrace? Wooden risers and hundreds of folding chairs atop the reflecting pool? Sweaty, scrofulous young men in nothing but shorts and sandals, rehearsing noisy outdoor battle scenes or dashing through tapestried halls as they rushed to make an entrance? Cast parties on opening nights, with the campy squeals of happy, drunken New York actors, floating through the summer air? This would not do.

  But my father pressed on. Either through defiance or denial, he began planning for a second summer of Shakespeare, giving only a nod to the everyday business of Stan Hywet Hall. Manned by its legions of volunteer ladies, Stan Hywet hummed along on autopilot. There were flower shows, salon concerts, a Christmas pageant, and a Festival of Tudor Sports. But Dad showed only a halfhearted interest. His passions lay elsewhere. He was intent on expanding the scope of his festival. Unbeknownst to him (or perhaps not), a quiet conspiracy was under way to prevent him from ever doing so.

  And so it was that on a Sunday in April the following spring, Stan Hywet’s board of directors met to decide whether to cancel the second season of the festival and, more ominously, whether to remove my father from his position. Once again, our fate hung in the balance. I was fifteen now, but apparently just as thick-headed as ever: like all those other times, my father’s professional jeopardy took me completely by surprise. Adding to the drama of the moment was the fact that the fateful board meeting was held in a large common room in the carriage house, just beneath our living room floor. The whole family, including my father, sat around waiting while our future was being hotly debated down below. Dad had his ardent supporters, of course, so passions ran high on both sides. We could hear shouting under the floorboards. But a strange gallows humor prevailed, and all of us were manically upbeat. All of us, that is, except my five-year-old sister, Sarah Jane, who sat in a corner by herself, in uncharacteristic silence.

  My folks had a peppy, exuberant friend on the board, a lawyer named Ralph Felver. Ralph was a forceful advocate of my father’s cause. Several times during the meeting, he sprinted upstairs to give us reports from the front. Late in the afternoon he burst in and shouted, “They killed the festival! Now they’re goin’ after the kid!” He turned and ran back downstairs, in a last-ditch attempt to save my father’s job. At that point, Sarah Jane stood, walked over to my father and asked in a quavering voice, “Daddy, what kid does he mean?”

  Dad was fired that day. Our days at Stan Hywet Hall were numbered. And I was left with an abiding, lifelong suspicion of small-bore civic boosters, genteel pseudo-aristocrats, conniving garden club mavens, and Ohio Republicans. For a few more months, Dad stayed on at Stan Hywet as a lame duck, but I can’t imagine that he gave the place much attention. Apart from his understandable bitterness, he had something far more pressing on his mind. In an eerie echo of the Toledo episode, he had passed the point of no return in planning the upcoming summer festival. Once again, actors had been hired, contracts had been signed, and obligations had to be met. He had to put on another season of the Akron Shakespeare Festival. He was legally bound. And anyway, what the hell else was he going to do? The question was where.

  [6]

  The Beefeater

  A fleeting memory of my father has always stuck in my mind. It was a memory from when I was seven. On a hot afternoon in Yellow Springs in the days of his Antioch festival, Dad was directing a rehearsal for The Taming of the Shrew. This was a tall order, considering that he was also playing the leading male role of Petruchio. (Opposite him in that production was Nancy Marchand in the role of Katharina. Years later she would grab a lot more attention for playing Tony Soprano’s diabolical mother Livia on HBO.) On the day of that long-ago rehearsal, my mother had packed a brown-bag lunch for my dad and had asked me to deliver it to him. Choosing my moment, I climbed up onto the stage and handed the bag to him. He took it from my hands without looking at me, removed a sandwich, unwrapped it, and bit into it, without taking his attention off of the rehearsal for even an instant. Looking up at him, I was filled with awe, admiration, and unease. There was something unsettling about his intensity. My father was not unloving, he was never harsh or cruel, he never punished me for anything (even when I most certainly deserved it). But he shared with every artist a forbidding fixity: when he focused on the work at hand, he was strangely absent.

  I saw that same look on his face about a week after the Stan Hywet board of directors had fired him. He had been driving around Akron, scouting out a venue for his suddenly unmoored summer festival. I was along for the ride. Dad pulled the Studebaker into the parking lot of Perkins Park, a neglected, uninviting patch of city-owned ground. We got out of the car to explore the three or four acres of weedy parkland. Trash was everywhere. The air was full of the shouts of city kids and the barking of stray dogs. The place couldn’t have been more different from the serene back terrace of Stan Hywet Hall.

  Something caught Dad’s attention. His whole nervous system seemed to quicken, like a dog catching a scent. Looking down a hillside at an open grove surrounded by dusty trees, he suddenly pictured a stage, with rows and rows of chairs set up in front of it. He pictured scaffolding with stage lights mounted on top. He pictured a lighting booth, a box office, and a concession stand. He swiveled around and calculated the number of parking spaces. In an animated stream of consciousness, he described out loud every detail of an imaginary outdoor playhouse. One week before, this man had suffered a terrible personal and professional setback, but now his mood was buoyant, almost giddy. His ardent
expression was the same one I recognized from that Shrew rehearsal, all those years before. And just as I had back then, I felt oddly excluded from his flight of fancy. But this time, I was feeling something else, too. Looking down at the ugly expanse of Perkins Park, I knew that a Shakespeare festival would never be held there. I was asking myself, “Is my father completely out of his mind?”

  Well, not quite. The second season of the Akron Shakespeare Festival did not take place in Perkins Park, but it did take place. My father found a venue only slightly less unlikely. This was the Ohio Theatre in Cuyahoga Falls, a derelict, run-down, four-hundred-seat theater perched on the edge of a gorge, across the Cuyahoga River from Akron proper. In its day, the Ohio had been a vaudeville house, a movie theater, and, most recently, a tabernacle for the Akron evangelist Rex Humbard. On the back wall, six feet above the stage, was a long-obsolete cement baptismal font. This dismal old building became the site of yet another of my father’s quixotic exploits. He set to work fitting out the Ohio Theatre for Shakespeare, creating something from nothing on the scrubby banks of the Cuyahoga. Time was short and the task was enormous, but this only seemed to heighten his energy and sharpen his focus. He tackled the project with the missionary zeal of Rex Humbard himself. Shakespeare provided his text, and he would quote it with twinkling eyes and an impish smile: “Sweet are the uses of adversity.”

  Dad brought in an old friend, a man named Clyde Blakeley, to mastermind the rapid renovation of the Ohio. Wiry and bespectacled, Clyde might have stepped out of the pages of Where’s Waldo? In a couple of my father’s other ventures, he had proven himself a miracle worker in the area of theatrical barn-raising. Clyde was a theater professor at the nearby Lake Erie College for Women, and he brought with him four of his best students to form the core of his technical support staff. To this tiny platoon of youthful theater rats, my big sister and I were willing recruits. Robin even dragooned a couple of her Buchtel girlfriends. This gave us a backstage crew of eight. At fifteen, I was the youngest, two years younger than the next oldest, and the only boy.

  As the days passed, ticking down to the opening of the summer season, I worked fifteen-hour days with this hardy band of young Amazons, performing every conceivable task. We painted the walls of the auditorium, perched on teetering scaffolds. We poured concrete for the stage floor. We stitched and stenciled a curtain to hang below the balcony of the unit set. We repaired dozens of battered, borrowed stage lights and outfitted them with colored gels. We hauled in and wired up two massive dimmer boards. We installed makeup tables, lights, and mirrors for the improvised dressing rooms. We mopped, we swept, we scrubbed. We even spent an entire day digging up a broken drainpipe and laying a new one for the one and only backstage sink. When water rattled down the drain and gushed through the new pipe, we cheered like a conquering army.

  In the midst of all this feverish activity, the actors arrived from New York and started to rehearse the first play. My father was the director, and, of all things, the play was The Taming of the Shrew. I paid no attention. I was too busy to notice. I wasn’t carrying a spear anymore, nor was I fetching my father’s lunch. I was a working stiff. I had a Social Security number. I was paid by check. I got seventy dollars a week, less deductions. I adored everyone around me. Among my sister’s pals, I even had a crush. In secret, stolen moments, I was regularly reaching first base with her. I was in heaven.

  Starting over from scratch, the festival was under extra pressure to bring in the crowds. Hence, Dad had chosen a slate of four Shakespearean warhorses. After Shrew came Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Macbeth. By August, all four were running in repertory. The productions were a little shoddy, but they were acted with the clarity and brio of my dad’s best work. The quality of the acting company was very high. It was full of holdovers from the preceding summer, including my idol Donald Moffat in the roles of Gremio, Malvolio, and Macbeth. Amazingly, when the doors were flung open and performances commenced, audiences showed up. They kept coming all summer, though not exactly in droves. But if sellouts were a rarity, the very fact that the festival had happened at all was success enough for all of us.

  I spent that whole summer backstage. I was in the cramped, sweltering lighting booth at every performance, operating the stage lights from one of the ancient dimmer boards. Mine held about twenty dimmers, each a disk of metal and cracked porcelain, a foot in diameter, operated independently of all the others by a ten-inch handle. On any given light cue, I would crank as many as eight of the dimmers at once, twisting myself into elaborate contortions and using three of my four limbs. The dimmers would sizzle and spark, spitting at me like so many angry cats, burning my forearms and zapping me with vicious bolts of electricity. And through all of this, I would hear familiar strains of Shakespearean verse, wafting toward me from the stage through the stultifying air.

  One night in late summer, Arthur Lithgow pulled off an outrageous onstage stunt. Over the years, this stunt took on the shimmering aura of legend for everyone who knew him. It was the work of a mad theatrical alchemist. That night, for two dazzling hours, he summoned up the same cocksure wizardry that had produced the entire summer season. I can think of no better example of his creativity, his charm, and his lunatic optimism.

  It happened like this. That summer the leading role of Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew was played by a protean young actor named Kenneth Ruta. When my father had hired him for the season, Ken had specified a single night when he had to be away to attend a wedding. The night was in August, during the time when all four plays were to be performed in rep. Dad had played Petruchio several times before so he scheduled The Taming of the Shrew for that night, intending to replace Ken for one performance only.

  But once the season got under way, another problem arose. The actor playing the role of Baptista in The Taming of the Shrew left the company, so my father stepped into his role for the remainder of the season. The night was approaching when Ken Ruta would be absent, and, of course, Dad was scheduled to replace him as well. In the play, Baptista is the crotchety father of Kate the Shrew. Petruchio is her rambunctious suitor. Baptista and Petruchio share several scenes. Clearly another actor had to be found. Everyone wondered who that might be. My father stayed mum.

  A couple of days before the crucial night, Dad instructed the prop woman to construct a freestanding coat rack to hold a single garment. Then he told the costume designer to whip up a full-length black cloak. When the two items were ready, he called an hour-long rehearsal. It was the morning of that problematic performance. At long last, he unveiled his plan for the evening. He announced to the incredulous company that he would play both Baptista and Petruchio simultaneously. In the scenes when both characters appeared together, he would act the role of Baptista in a little orange hat and the big black cloak. When Petruchio spoke, he would doff the cloak, reveal Petruchio’s bright, beribboned costume underneath, and drape hat and cloak onto the coat rack. Then he and every other character would relate to the coat rack as if it were Baptista, still onstage with them. When Petruchio made a bravura exit, he would don hat and cloak in one sweeping motion, without leaving the stage, and Baptista would reappear, as large as life. In the course of the play, he had plotted six times when he would execute this trick.

  As they rehearsed the key scenes, the skeptical cast was gradually converted. That evening, he made a curtain speech to the audience, dressed in the black cloak and the orange hat. He explained to them what they were about to see. As he described the forthcoming Baptista/Petruchio switcheroo, he demonstrated it by whipping off his cloak and hat. I was watching from the wings as he thoroughly charmed the crowd. I remember his concluding words verbatim, all these years later:

  “I beg you not to look for any Freudian significance in the fact that the same actor is playing both son and father-in-law. If you do find such a significance, that’s your problem. Our problem is to put on a performance of The Taming of the Shrew. I hope you enjoy it.”

  They did, and w
ildly. My father was in his element, and the crowd ate it up. The show got the biggest laughs and loudest applause of the summer. Looking back, I realize that my father was an unwitting teacher that night. And, backstage, stooping over my dimmer board, I was an unwitting student. His succinct lesson has stayed with me ever since: make a pact with an audience and they’ll follow you anywhere.

  Within weeks of my dad’s big night, the summer season was over. But before it ended, I got the chance to emerge from my lighting booth and do my first substantial piece of acting on a professional stage. In those last weeks, when day-long rehearsals were a thing of the past, a couple of gung-ho young company members came up with the idea of a workshop. Eager to try their hand at directing, they wanted to present a single extracurricular program of short dramatic pieces after an evening performance, inviting the paid audience to stick around and watch. To cast these pieces, they first tried to enlist the actors who were doing the heavy lifting in the festival repertory. Not surprisingly, they came up empty-handed. So, to my delight, they turned to the backstage crew. Being the one and only male in that group, I was perfectly positioned to land a part.

  One of the pieces on the workshop program was a one-act play by George Bernard Shaw called The Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Written in 1914, the play is Shaw’s argument for a British national theater, embedded in an amiable comedy of mistaken identity. It is set at the end of the sixteenth century, on the grounds outside of Windsor Castle, and the main character is William Shakespeare himself. As it opens, Shakespeare is loitering at the foot of the castle, awaiting a tryst with his “dark lady.” Instead, Queen Elizabeth enters, sleepwalking outside the castle’s battlements. Thinking her his lover, Shakespeare awakens her, then immediately recognizes her. In the droll dialogue that follows, Shakespeare becomes Shaw’s mouthpiece as he passionately makes his case to the queen for a royal playhouse.