Drama: An Actor's Education

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 wildly. 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.

But before Queen Elizabeth arrives onstage, Shakespeare is confronted by a Beefeater, a royal guardsman patrolling the castle grounds. Although the Beefeater is a tiny part, it is a witty, colorful, and very noticeable one. With so few willing volunteers available, the part was mine. And then, to my near disbelief, Donald Moffat himself consented to play the central role of William Shakespeare. I had been given the chance to rehearse, to run lines, and to act in front of an audience with my revered mentor. It was incredible! And even more incredible, Donald seemed perfectly happy to be acting with me.

As it happened, my performance as the Beefeater was a modest triumph. But, curiously, my success in the role was a direct result of my own ineptitude and obliviousness. Let me explain.

In The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, the Beefeater is a rough-hewn, plainspoken, working-class man. But he has the uncanny habit of tossing off phrases from Hamlet, a work that hasn’t even been written yet. In the course of his conversation with Shakespeare, he speaks several such phrases: “Angels and ministers of grace defend us,” “Frailty, thy name is woman,” “You cannot feed capons so,” and many more. Every time this happens, Shakespeare avidly jots down the phrases in a little notebook and curses himself for not thinking of them first. It is a device Shaw uses about ten times, to greater and greater comic effect. At one point Shakespeare even cries out, “This man is a greater genius than I am!”

Oddly enough, of all the Shakespeare I had absorbed up to that point, Hamlet was a glaring omission. Just like the Beefeater, I was completely unaware that I was speaking famous lines, and no one had thought it necessary to inform me of the fact. As a result, every time I spoke one of these lines in front of our audience, it was greeted with inexplicable gales of laughter. During those booming three-second laughs, Donald’s face would crinkle with pleasure and his eyes would signal congratulatory approval. I was thrilled, of course, but at the same time I was completely befuddled by all that laughter. And I suppose that befuddlement was precisely what was called for. That night, I was the definitive Shavian Beefeater, and I had no idea why. Afterwards, everyone praised me for my knowing performance and my crafty comic timing. I said nothing to disabuse them.

Somewhere in the hurly-burly of that crazy summer, my father got another job. Unbeknownst to me, he was invited to join the staff of the McCarter Theatre at Princeton University for the coming fall. At the Ohio Theatre, closing night came and went. The company disbanded with the usual combination of merriment and melancholy. The crew hung around to undo all of their own work from the preceding spring. Then the crew disbanded, too. The Akron Shakespeare Festival was no more. Since then, my memory has played its usual tricks. I have no recollection of moving out of the Stan Hywet carriage house, loading up the Studebaker, calling friends to say goodbye, kissing my almost-girlfriend for the last time, or driving off to central New Jersey. But all of it happened. My Akron episode came to an end. While it lasted, it was so jam-packed with vital new experiences that now, in my memory, it seems like a dream. Maybe it has become so dreamlike because, in all these years, I’ve never been back.

[7] Most Creative

There is a road in New Jersey that leads from Route 1 into Princeton. The road is less than a mile long. It runs through broad fields, is lined with tall trees, and crosses a stone bridge over a pretty, man-made lake before it takes you past the college and into the twee village. Traveling that road, you pass from the concrete commerce of Jersey to the groves of preppy academe. It is hard to imagine a greater change in so short a distance, or a more beautiful entrance to a town. As the Lithgow family motored down that road in September of 1961, I felt like I was passing through a gateway into a totally different life.

It was different all right, and mostly for the better. My father was now an employee on the outer fringes of Princeton University. The family was billeted in junior faculty housing down by Carnegie Lake, far from Princeton’s faux-Gothic quadrangles. In that status-conscious college community, my father’s professional standing barely registered. He had been hired by the university’s estimable professional theater company, in residence at the McCarter Theatre, but he certainly wasn’t in charge. His title there was “Education Coordinator.” His task was to travel up and down the state, presenting school assemblies to thousands of high school kids, preparing them for student matinees at the McCarter. It was an admirable mission but lonely work, involving hours of solitary driving on wintry roads, endless crowds of unruly teens, and little contact with his artistic peers. And despite Princeton’s prestige, the job was unquestionably a comedown for him. He was strenuously promoting McCarter’s theatrical fare, but he had virtually nothing to do with the productions themselves.

But if this was an indignity to him, he didn’t show it. Indeed, he was flattered by his association with an Ivy League school, and his reduced responsibilities seemed almost a relief to him after his recent years of prolonged cultural combat. He attacked his new job with good humor, renewed vigor, and zest. His high school assemblies evolved into lively dramatic monologues, firing the imagination of the students and priming them for their first