Drama: An Actor's Education

a kind of eager hunger, marking the meter, savoring the suspense, and devouring all those exotic new words. He is only a child, but I suspect he already knows, he can feel in his bones, that storytelling will define his later life.

And so it did. Growing into adolescence, Arthur commandeered a little room on the top floor of the Melrose house and immersed himself in books. Ghostly storytellers had found their most attentive listener: Rudyard Kipling, Washington Irving, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott. And as he worked his way through all these timeworn treasures, he made a life-changing discovery. As an older man, my father described the moment when he “caught a fever”: he came across the plays of William Shakespeare. Reading from a single hefty volume of the Complete Works, the teenage boy proceeded to methodically plow through the entire vast canon.

A few years later, such literary passions sent Arthur westward to Ohio, to Antioch College, in Yellow Springs. There his love of storytelling evolved into a love of theater. At Antioch, he poured his energies into student productions. Cast as Hamlet in his senior year, he caught the eye of an infatuated freshman, a Baptist minister’s daughter from Rochester, New York, named Sarah Price. When Arthur graduated, he headed straight to New York City, where he joined the legions of aspiring young actors scrabbling for work in the depths of the Depression. Within months of his arrival, he was astonished to find Sarah Price on his doorstep, having dropped out of Antioch to follow him east. With no reasonable notion of what else to do, he married her. It was a marriage that was to last sixty-four years, until his death in 2004.

By the time my conscious memory kicks in, it was the late 1940s and the couple were back in Yellow Springs. In the intervening years, Arthur had turned his back on New York theater; he had taught at Vermont’s Putney School; he had worked in wartime industry in Rochester; and he had completed basic training in the U.S. Army. Just as he was about to be shipped out to the South Pacific, I was born. Arthur was now the father of three children. According to army policy, this made him eligible for immediate discharge. He seized the opportunity and rushed home to Rochester.

The next stop for the burgeoning young family was Ithaca, New York, where the G.I. Bill paid for Arthur’s master’s degree in playwriting at Cornell. A year later, he was working as a junior faculty member in English and drama at his alma mater, Antioch College. He was also producing plays for the Antioch Area Theatre in the old Yellow Springs Opera House. Among those plays were A Doll’s House and The Emperor’s New Clothes. A year after that, when I was approaching four years old, I start to remember.

The Lithgow family lived in Yellow Springs for ten years. When we moved away, I had just finished sixth grade. Those ten years would prove to be the longest stretch in one place of my entire childhood. I’ve only been back to Yellow Springs twice for fleeting visits, and the last visit was almost thirty years ago. Even so, it is the closest thing I have to a hometown.

In the first show of mine that I actually remember, I had a lousy part. I was the Chief Cook of the Castle in a third-grade school production of The Sleeping Beauty. It took place in broad daylight on a terrace outside The Antioch School. This was the lab school of Antioch College, where I was receiving a progressive, fun, and not very good education.

As the Chief Cook, my entire role consisted of chasing my assistant onto the stage with a rolling pin, then dropping to the ground and falling asleep for a hundred years at the moment Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger. I must have known what a bad part it was, but perhaps because of that I took particular care with my costume. I persuaded my father to make me a chef’s hat befitting the Chief Cook of the Castle. With surprising ingenuity, he folded a large piece of posterboard into a tall cylinder, then fashioned a puffy crown at the top with white crepe paper. The hat was almost as tall as I was. I was delighted.

“Now we’ll just cut it down to half this height and it’ll be perfect,” my father said.

“Oh, no, Dad!” I said. “Leave it!”

“But you’ll run onstage and it’ll fall off your head,” he reasoned.

“No, it won’t!” I insisted. “This is the hat of the Chief Cook of the Castle! It’s got to be very tall! Leave it!”

The next day, I carried the lordly hat into my classroom. My schoolmates were awestruck.

“It’s beautiful!” said Mrs. Parker. “But shouldn’t we cut it down to half this height? You’ll run onstage and it will fall off your head.”

“No, it won’t!” I exclaimed. “This is the hat of the Chief Cook of the Castle! The most important cook in the entire kingdom! It’s got to be very, very tall!”

My vehement arguments prevailed. The performance was that afternoon. When my cue came, I ran onstage and my hat immediately fell off my head. After the show, I chose not to answer the eight or ten people who asked, “Why did they give you such a tall hat?”

This was perhaps the first instance of the extravagant excess for which I would one day become so well known. But considering what my father was up to at the time, such grandiosity is hardly surprising.

Photograph by Axel Bahnsen. Courtesy Arthur Lithgow papers, Kent State University Libraries, Special Collections and Archives.

My father was producing Shakespeare on an epic scale. In the summer of 1951, in league with two of his faculty colleagues, he launched “Shakespeare Under the Stars,” otherwise known as the Antioch Shakespeare Festival. It was to last until 1957. The plays that had sparked the imagination of that lonely boy in an attic room in Melrose, Massachusetts, came to life on a platform stage beneath the twin spires of the stately Main Hall of Antioch College. In every one of those summers, my father’s company of avid young actors, many of them freshly minted graduates of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Tech, would achieve the impossible. Each season they would open seven Shakespeare plays in the course of nine weeks, rehearsing in the day and performing at night. Once all seven had opened, the company would perform them in rotating repertory, a different play every night of the week, for the final month of the summer. In 1951, the company began with a season of Shakespeare’s history plays. By 1957, they had performed all of the others as well, thirty-eight in all, many of them twice over. My father directed several of them and acted in several more, with an exuberant flamboyance that banished forever his boyhood shyness.

Were the shows any good? In those days I thought they were magnificent. To my young eyes these were the greatest stage actors in the country, my father was the finest director, and Shakespeare couldn’t possibly be performed any better. As the years passed, I began to doubt my childhood impressions. How good could the productions have been with such hasty rehearsals, such threadbare costumes, and such an untested troupe? A twenty-six-year-old King Lear? A professor’s wife as Olivia? Grad students sprinkled among all the minor parts? Though I never lost my sense of awe at the magnitude of my father’s achievement, a certain skepticism crept in when I grew to be a theater professional myself.

But then one day, only a few years ago, I received a package in the mail at my Los Angeles home. It contained an audio cassette. The cassette had been sent to me by a man whose late father, an actor named Kelton Garwood, had been a longtime fixture of the Antioch Festival, fifty years before. In going through Kelton’s effects, his son had found an old reel-to-reel recording. It contained fragments of a live performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor from an Antioch production in 1954. Kelton was featured on the recording in the role of Simple. His son had made a copy of the recording and sent it to me. The day it arrived, I popped the cassette into my car’s tape deck as I drove to work. Out came the scratchy sound of a scene involving a dizzy barmaid named Mistress Quickly, a sullen servant named Jack Rugby, and a manic Frenchman named Dr. Caius. Dr. Caius was played by my father. The scene was spirited, fast-paced, and riotously funny. The tape captured the sound of the audience, roaring with laughter and showering the actors with exit applause. The actors’ unamplified voices were ringing and clear, their timing was expert, and their command of the material was unerring. They were hilarious. As for my dad himself, he was even better than my oldest, fondest recollection of him. I pulled my car over to the side of the road. For a half hour, I sat by myself in a Proustian reverie, listening to the sound of marvelous actors, performing for me from the grave, fifty years after the fact.

Photograph by Axel Bahnsen.

For me, the lazy days of summer in Yellow Springs were a heady blend of Ring Lardner’s Midwest and Shakespeare’s Cheapside. I had my share of Little League baseball, Boy Scout camp, the