Drama: An Actor's Education

made me feel more American than ever. The opening words of Buffalo Springfield resonated in my head:

There’s something happening here.

What it is ain’t exactly clear.

“Here” did not refer to England. It was time to go home.

On my return, I didn’t exactly dive into the trenches. I went right to work for my father. Several months before, halfway through my second year abroad, I had slipped home to Princeton for a month to direct As You Like It for Dad’s McCarter Theatre Repertory Company. On that visit I had come loaded with directorial ideas and rehearsal techniques cribbed from my favorite London productions. The show was the hit of the McCarter season. For me, it had served as a highly successful audition: the company loved performing it, audiences had received it warmly, and I had comfortably navigated the twin challenges of nepotism and overweening youth. As a result, my father was emboldened to offer me an entire season of work at McCarter, his seventh as the company’s artistic director. A letter from him arrived at our London flat. In a quaint blending of formality and fatherly affection, he laid out his terms:

January 29, 1969

Mr. John Lithgow

61 Onslow Gardens

London S.W. 7

ENGLAND

Dear John,

Your letter home has bugged me into writing an official sort of communication that I have been too slow in getting off.

In the first place, the production of As You Like It has been a great success at many levels. The general public and the student public has been delighted. The Shakespeare Establishment on the faculty seem ecstatic (after all, the obscure material on the allowed fool has remained uncut, unlike most productions). And, most rewarding perhaps, the Company loves to play it. Furthermore, our august Committee itself has initiated enquiries about your availability for next year.

Naturally, I have never entertained any doubts about your artistic and productive capabilities. Indeed, my main concern about my own dilatoriness was what I have thought the likelihood that you would be making commitments to the theatre there in London which would obviate a possibility here at McCarter.

While there are good psychological reasons why you should go off on your own for your next professional step, thoroughly objective good sense can be found in offering you an important rank on the McCarter artistic staff next season. The particular emphasis in acting, design, and directing, the details, the draft problems or its interference — all of these can wait upon conversations. You can go on the payroll as early as July 1st, if certain assignments are attractive, and you could count on at least $150.00 per week.

At any rate, give us an opportunity to compete with other offers which might be upcoming for you. I’d be interested in a structuring of your own particular interests at this time.

Affectionately, but officially,

Dad

In subsequent conversations, my father outlined his plans for me. He proposed that I direct and design two productions and play major roles in several others. It would be my first time working under an Actors’ Equity contract, an eight-month job that perfectly suited my triple-threat ambitions. Considering my age and inexperience, it is inconceivable that any other regional theater producer would have made me such an offer, but I ignored the implicit favoritism. My father asked and I accepted. I rushed home in midsummer, 1969, to help him staff up for the coming year. Jean stayed behind in London for another month to finish her teaching commitments, and I went right to work.

My first McCarter assignment was a solitary one. At the wheel of my newly imported blue station wagon, I drove out of Princeton to visit summer-stock companies all over the Northeast. The trip was to be a random search for young talent, with special attention paid to set designers. I hit the road with a list of theaters, a pocketful of McCarter cash, and no specific itinerary. This proved to be unwise. For days I wandered New England like the Ancient Mariner, clocking hundreds of miles and nodding through woefully inept summer-stock shows in sweltering, barnlike playhouses, fanning myself with my program and ducking the nosedives of the occasional bat. The only designer prospects I spotted were “highly desirables,” long since committed to other jobs.

After my first few stops I became convinced of the futility of my mission. But I pressed on anyway. In fact, I was having a pretty good time. New England was green and gorgeous in the mid-August sunshine, and I reveled in my solitude. I was still in a transitional mode between two worlds, reacquainting myself to the States. Having been away for two long years, I was a twenty-three-year-old Rip Van Winkle, keenly attuned to how much the country had changed since I’d left. Radicalism was being subtly incorporated into the culture. The long hair, torn jeans, head bands, beads, and tie-dyed T-shirts of the hip young had created a new aesthetic, very different from the Kings Road modishness of London. Images of smiling, assimilated African-Americans were all over TV and billboard advertising, an astonishing change from two years before. The car radio blared with the exuberant defiance of Hendrix; Joplin; Crosby, Stills, and Nash; and Country Joe and the Fish. These were the sights and sounds of a changed America, and I drank it all in. But if I felt the giddy excitement of a returning prodigal, that excitement was tempered by the nagging awareness of all that I’d been missing.

On a Thursday, I left the town of Stowe, Vermont, having sat through a threadbare production of The Apple Tree there the night before. Heading south, I had chosen the Taconic Parkway, a route that took me through upstate New York, alongside the Massachusetts border. I was thinking that I might catch an evening performance of the American Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, in southern Connecticut. But I hadn’t decided for sure, and I was in no particular hurry. When I stopped at a cafe for lunch, I overheard a conversation at the cash register about a three-day music festival that was just getting underway in the area. Back in the car, I heard even more about it from a radio disk jockey. Several of the very groups I had been listening to were expected to perform. I began to notice a proliferation of VW microbuses on the road, spray-painted in rainbow colors and packed with funky, long-haired young people. I surmised that they must be heading to that festival I’d been hearing about.

“This might be interesting,” I thought. “Maybe I should go.”

I sized up my situation. My wife was on the other side of the ocean. I’d spent hardly any of my expense- account money. I had no set schedule and no immediate obligations. My talent-scouting trip was yielding no results. I could easily spare three or four days. And even if I couldn’t find a place to stay, I could always sleep in the back of my station wagon. Jimi Hendrix? Richie Havens? Joan Baez? The Grateful Dead? The Who?

“Three days of peace and music”? Sounds great.

Why not?

… Naaaah!

I kept driving that day. By evening I was sitting by myself in a stuffy crowd, watching Henry V in Stratford, Connecticut. A few days later I was back in Princeton, reporting dutifully to my father on my fruitless mission. I thereby missed out on one of the most pivotal moments in the history of rock and roll, three days that would come to define my generation. I missed Woodstock.

What if I’d made an abrupt right turn and headed to Max Yasgur’s farm that afternoon? What if I’d heard all that music, smoked all that dope, and done all that acid? What if I’d danced in the rain, played in the mud, and screwed stoned-out girls in the back of my car? What if I had rebelled against the careful orderliness of my life — my tidy marriage, my dutiful job, my accommodating father, my “art”? What if, for one weekend, I had broken loose? Such speculation is pointless, of course. I would never have done any of those things. It simply wasn’t me. My orderly life was a response to the disorder of the years that had gone before. The only moments of rebellion I allowed myself were playacted moments onstage, with all my lines written out for me. I would rebel all right, but it wouldn’t be for several more years. And when it happened, it wouldn’t be at a music festival.

[19] The Triumph of Nepotism