Drama: An Actor's Education

by John Lithgow

  Although he was not the production’s director, Arvin Brown had cast me somewhat arbitrarily in the role of Kendal. Kendal is a forward on the team. He is a big man with the stolidity and limited intelligence of an ox. As with every other role in the play, Kendal’s dialogue reveals almost nothing of his life outside that room. From the moment he enters, his only outward preoccupation is a newly purchased electric tool kit that he proudly shows to a couple of his teammates. Nonetheless, his character is vivid and indelible. All through Act I, Kendal is the butt of numerous jokes from his taunting teammates. The jokes sail right over his head. They obliquely hint that Kendal’s wife is a loose woman and that a few members of the team have already cuckolded him. But the earnest and unperceptive Kendal seems completely innocent of this knowledge. Reading the play, I instantly fell in love with the part.

  In the play’s middle act, halfway through the match, the team bursts back into the changing room like a herd of panting cattle. They are covered with mud, numb with cold, and gasping for breath. They are losing the match, and this makes them foul-tempered and quarrelsome. They guzzle water bottles, nurse cuts and bruises, and endure the hectoring pep talk of their coach. Then they pull themselves together and roar back out for the second half of play. A little time passes with only the janitor left on the empty set, listening to occasional muffled phrases from the game’s announcer over a crackly speaker in a corner of the room.

  Photograph by William L. Smith. Courtesy Long Wharf Theatre.

  Suddenly one of the players is brought back in, having just been seriously injured on the field. He bays with pain. His nose is broken and streams with blood. His eyes are so swollen he can barely see. He struggles so violently that his coach and two trainers must pin him to the training table. They tend to him with ointments and cotton swabs. One of the trainers helps him into an adjoining room, where he bathes himself in a big communal tub, unseen by the audience. After a couple of minutes, the trainer helps the injured player back onstage. He is naked, disoriented, and glistening with bathwater. The trainer sits him down on a bench and ministers to him. In a long, virtually wordless scene, with only the distant roar of the crowd filling the air, the trainer towels the player down from head to foot, dresses him like a helpless child, bundles him up, and steers him toward the door, returning him to the desolation of his bleak life. Just before he reaches the door, the injured player remembers, through the fog of his addled mind, something he has left behind in the changing room. It is his electric tool kit.

  The injured player is Kendal. My part.

  And by a happy chance, so typical of the serendipity of our profession, the trainer was to be played by my good friend, the former McCarter Theatre “Don Pedro,” John Braden.

  We’d been given four weeks of rehearsal. Our director was Michael Rudman, a sardonic Texan who had long since emigrated to England. By yet another stroke of serendipity, Michael had been the man who hired me to coach American accents at the RSC in London, three years before. Under his deft direction, our sprawling production took shape. He tapped into the testosterone coursing through the veins of a twenty-two-man ensemble. He sent us off to a park to play touch football together. He brought in a Yale coach to dispense the basic rules of rugby. He steeped us in the guttural molasses of North Country accents. He showed us David Storey’s rugby film This Sporting Life. He noted the competitiveness, showmanship, insecurity, and physical jeopardy in the lives of both actors and athletes. Cannily drawing parallels between the two professions, Michael unleashed us, forging a show that surged with masculine energy.

  Nudity, of course, was an essential element of the staging. Professional athletes don’t enter and exit a locker room on the day of a game without twice taking off all of their clothes. But Michael was intent that nudity should not be the play’s titillating main event. He wanted it to emerge as part of the overall texture of the production, so frank and realistic as to pass virtually unnoticed. As he saw it, this openness needed to characterize even the rehearsal process. Notwithstanding the presence of Annie Keefe, our attractive young stage manager, all traces of hesitancy or self-consciousness had to be banished. In this, Michael had an eager confederate in the horse-faced Rex Robbins. Rex was a veteran character man with a dry, winning manner and a readiness to try anything onstage. He played the part of Fielding, the oldest player on the team. On our second day of work he casually shed every stitch of clothing, striding around the rehearsal room as if it were the most natural thing in the world and startling everyone with the size of his softball-shaped scrotum. Rex’s insouciance had the desired effect. In no time at all, the rugby players in the cast went from giggly and self-conscious to offhand and swaggering. Some moved right on to flat-out exhibitionistic. Weeks later, at our drunken opening-night party, most of the company strutted around with a newfound, cocksure manliness. The rest giddily sprinted out of the closet. One or two did both.

  Similarly, the larger concept of onstage nudity evolved in our minds over the course of the rehearsal period. Initially the subject of embarrassed laughter, we began to see nudity as the most potent theatrical expression of vulnerability and naked truth. Serious acting is a constant effort to illuminate, expose, and unlock emotion. There is no escaping its essential pretense, but actors are always striving to make that pretense invisible, to present life with such honesty that members of the audience momentarily forget that they are watching a play. And what is more honest than a naked body? Of course the use of nudity onstage needs to be handled with great care. A naked person standing in front of hundreds of other people is such an unfamiliar, unsettling event that it is just as likely to make an audience recoil as to disarm them. But supported by a superb play and a deft, deeply felt production, we had the growing sense that, with The Changing Room, we were about to work a minor theatrical miracle.

  In the days leading up to our first performance, Michael presided over the obligatory technical and dress rehearsals. For long, tedious hours, the cast shuffled through the staging while he carefully adjusted all the tech aspects of the production around us. He calibrated the sounds of the crowd that emanated from the offstage rugby pitch, the rain that streaked the grimy windowpanes, the harsh glare of the overhead lamps, and the slate-gray daylight outside the windows as it gradually faded to darkness. Every visual and aural detail was calculated to create the superrealistic illusion of that room on that day in that part of northern England. Even odors came into play: all through Act I, as we prepared for the match, we rubbed wintergreen onto our bare thighs so that its astringent smell would fill the theater for every performance.

  One naturalistic detail was utterly unique, especially to American audiences. This was the large offstage bathtub. Communal bathing after an athletic event was unheard of in the U.S. (and has since disappeared in the U.K. as well). But it was de rigueur in the time and place of The Changing Room. Although Michael placed the tub out of the sight of the audience, he made it a vivid part of the action of the play. As with every other aspect of his production, he didn’t want the unseen bathtub activity to betray a hint of artifice. In Act III he wanted the audience to hear the players sloshing around and braying their bawdy songs as they bathed together. He wanted cascades of bathwater to splash into the open doorway and onto the duckboards on the changing room floor. When the players entered from the bath, he wanted their pale bodies dripping wet and flushed pink from the hot water. And of course there was that key scene in Act II: Kendal exits the stage covered in mud and blood, plunges into the offstage tub, and reemerges a few minutes later, washed clean.

  In the rehearsal room, we had merely gone through the motions of bathing. At the first tech rehearsal, the crew filled up the tub and we bathed in earnest. The effect was sensational. None of us had ever felt so goddamned real onstage. But after the first few hours, reality struck back. The tub sprung a leak. The crew drained it immediately, let it dry out, coated the seams with thick layers of caulking, then let it dry out again. The whole process took a couple o
f days. In the meantime, we pressed on with our tech rehearsals, minus the water and the mud, pretending to bathe just as we had in the rehearsal room.

  In my Act II scene, stage manager Annie Keefe had to calculate exactly how much time it would require for me to take an actual bath. Hence, when the moment came, I staggered offstage in my uniform, hastily cast it off, jumped down into the empty tub and began a bizarre bath-pantomime. Except for the absence of water, it was accurate in every detail. I crouched stark naked in the tub, pretending to scrub myself clean. I dipped my head under invisible water, ran my fingers through my dry hair, and frenetically rubbed imaginary mud and sweat off every inch of my body. Three or four fully clothed crew members stood above me in the semidarkness, watching indifferently. One of them was Annie Keefe, holding a stopwatch and timing me. I was a naked man in an empty plywood box in an empty theater on an October afternoon in New Haven, Connecticut. I was the main character in a strange, surrealistic dream. For a fleeting moment, my brain departed my body. It floated above me and looked down at this naked, ludicrously contorted young man. A conscious thought formed itself, one that has passed through my mind a hundred times since:

  What am I doing with my life?

  I was acting, of course.

  And not just acting. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was also preparing for my first major breakthrough in show business. And by glorious good fortune, that breakthrough was linked to a stunning work of dramatic art. The Changing Room fulfilled the promise of theater like nothing that I’d ever been in. It had an overwhelming impact on our audiences. On several occasions, spectators needed to be literally helped out of their seats. As emotional exercise, it was visceral and cathartic. The show was an instant success at Long Wharf and the subject of glowing national press. Lavish praise was heaped on the play, the production, and the entire company. I was one of the few actors singled out. For the first time I was mentioned in the pages of Time magazine, where I chose to ignore the fact that I was referred to as “George Lithgow.”

  We began our run at Long Wharf with the sense that, for nearly all of us, this was the finest piece of theater we had ever been a part of. But the best was still to come. After one of our last performances, we were summoned into the empty theater. An elegant, expansive man named Charles Bowden introduced himself to us. He grandly announced that he had assembled a team of producers to transfer the show, exactly as we were performing it, to the Morosco Theatre on Forty-fifth Street in New York for the following March. We were going to Broadway!

  The notion of acting on Broadway had been almost as foreign to me as acting in movies. Years before, I’d filled out my application for a Fulbright grant. One of the questions on the form asked how I would apply my experience if I were to study abroad. I had written three words: “American repertory theater.” This was the world I’d come from and where I intended to return. At the time it represented the extent of my ambitions. My one vainglorious flirtation with the movies had done little to broaden those ambitions. My career at Long Wharf was only a couple of months old, but I’d felt no need to seek a better setting elsewhere. It felt like home. And now one of my very first Long Wharf productions was propelling me to another level of the business, one that I had thought I would never attain. I was astonished and I was elated, in equal measure.

  The next few months passed quickly. The timing of our projected Broadway opening allowed me to perform in two more Long Wharf shows. Several actors from The Changing Room acted in those shows as well, so for all of us the air was charged with electric anticipation. Jean and I retooled for another big move. Most of the company showed up at our Branford apartment for a pre-matinee brunch celebrating Ian’s first birthday. In February the Changing Room cast regrouped in a New Haven rehearsal studio. It was Valentine’s Day and, by chance, Michael Rudman’s birthday. Charles Bowden and his producing team were on hand with an enormous birthday cake. Bowden had secretly slipped the actors sheet music for “My Funny Valentine” and we surprised Michael with a hearty rendition of the song. Spirits were soaring as we set about putting the show back together for New York.

  Jean, Ian, and I took up temporary residence in the Upper West Side apartment of a touring actress friend. Under Michael Rudman’s stewardship, the company installed the show in the venerable Morosco Theatre, where it looked better than ever. The Morosco has long since disappeared, making way for an enormous Marriott Hotel on Times Square, but back then it was a prime legit house in the heart of the midtown theater district. The old building resonated with American theater lore, having been the site of the first runs of such classics as Our Town, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Death of a Salesman. That season our show was within shouting distance of Pippin, That Championship Season, and A Little Night Music. Heady with excitement, we moved into our dressing rooms, linked up with working pals in adjoining theaters, and staked out our favorite restaurants and bars. We previewed. We opened. That night we gathered at Sardi’s after the show to celebrate. The New York Times review was read out loud. We were a smash.

  Opening night was March 7, 1973. Less than three weeks later, on March 25, in what was surely the shortest period of time between a Broadway debut and a Tony victory, I won that year’s Tony Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a play.

  Sure. Acting awards are trumped-up, corrupting, meaningless, and unjust. They are anti-art. In a profession that relies on a collaborative spirit, they pit artists against one another. They are the wellspring of more envy, anger, resentment, and covetousness than anything else in show business. Awards turn us into appalling hypocrites. We airily dismiss their importance but we secretly long for them. When we win them, we are often at our very worst. Our acceptance speeches are generally a graceless cavalcade of pomposity, crocodile tears, and egregious false modesty. An award winner is usually the only person in the room who is genuinely pleased by his prize. By varying degrees, everyone else is bitter, begrudging, and judgmental. Often this even includes the cast of a winner’s very own show. All things considered, it is far better to never win an award for acting.

  That said . . .

  Winning a Tony Award was the happiest moment I’d ever experienced in a theater. Nanette Fabray opened an envelope and read my name. Applause exploded all around me. I lurched up the steps to the Imperial Theatre’s stage in my rented tuxedo, my ruffled shirt, and my black velvet bowtie. I stared out at the brightly lit mass of beaming faces, my heart racing like a hummingbird’s wings. By some miracle I managed to recite every word of my carefully wrought speech. Seeing a grainy tape of that moment a couple of years ago, I saw none of the elation I remember feeling. I looked like a tremulous, stammering schoolboy. And with the lingering traces of my unwitting British accent, I sounded like a pretentious fop.

  Oh, but it was wonderful. All actors strive for that elusive moment when the quality of their work is matched by the measure of its success. Such an occurrence is all too rare. Many of us go through our entire careers without it happening once. And here it was, on my very first outing. Between a Broadway debut and a Tony Award, I barely slept for the entire month of March.

  The twin events ushered in a springtime full of sparkly new pleasures. The city, so recently an impregnable fortress of rejection and failure, suddenly flung open its doors. I and my Changing Room cast mates became fixtures at Downey’s, Lüchow’s, Jimmy Ray’s, and Joe Allen. The play won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and we hobnobbed with the likes of Clive Barnes, John Simon, and Walter Kerr. We formed an unbeatable softball team for the Broadway Show League in Central Park. Our press agent cooked up a publicity stunt pitting us against a squad from the star-studded all-female cast of The Women (Alexis Smith! Rhonda Fleming! Myrna Loy!). I was sprung loose from our show for three days for my network TV debut, appearing in a tiny role with the great Jason Robards in a Hallmark Hall of Fame production of The Country Girl. Blessings rained down on me.

  One day halfway through our time at the Morosco, an envelope arrived for me at the st
age door. It contained a kindly note from John Stix, from Baltimore Center Stage. Without a trace of sour grapes he congratulated me on The Changing Room. In particular, he complimented me for having made such a wise decision in choosing to accept an offer from the Long Wharf Theatre.

  Once I settled into the run of the show, Jean and I sought out another temporary housing situation. Back in New Jersey, my parents were now living outside of Princeton, renting a farmhouse surrounded by soybean fields near the village of Plainsboro. There was plenty of room for my family of three, so we moved in. I commuted daily to New York for my shows. Every night I sat on the train and read the next morning’s edition of the New York Times. It was filled with coverage of the Watergate hearings and of the epic downfall of Richard Nixon. The extended Lithgow family, like the rest of liberal America, basked in the warm glow of political schadenfreude. My parents loved our company. In the sunny New Jersey countryside, Ian was in toddler heaven. My father and I replayed every game of the historic chess face-off in Iceland between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. On a day off from the show, the cast of The Changing Room traveled down en masse for a picnic in the expansive yard of the Plainsboro house. For Jean and me, it was the happiest time in our marriage.