Drama: An Actor's Education

town pool, even a couple of family car trips to the woods of Kentucky. But these episodes were brief and unmemorable compared to the fantastical pleasures of the summer Shakespeare Festival. Toothy, skinny, barefoot, and nut brown, my buzz cut bleached to near-white by the sun, I would hang out at the theater for hours on end, watching rehearsals, chatting precociously with the actors, and striking up unlikely friendships with them. On reflection, I realize that they must have been a pretty callow bunch, since none of them could have been over thirty. But as a child I considered them to be sophisticated, worldly, seasoned artistes. I was deeply flattered that they seemed to treat me as a peer. It never occurred to me that they were merely being nice to the boss’s son.

Acting careers are ephemeral. Many of the young actors from those days flirted with stardom in the years to come, but few actually achieved it. Age, of course, has overtaken most of them and their moment has passed. But devotees of the American theater scene over the last fifty years would recognize the names of Ellis Rabb, Earle Hyman, Nancy Marchand, William Ball, Pauline Flanagan, Lester Rawlins, Laurence Luckinbill, and Donald Moffat. To my young eyes, they were the definitive King Lear, Othello, Katharina, Puck, Rosalind, Dogberry, Iago, and Justice Shallow, respectively. And I worshiped them all.

One of the big disappointments of my young life came during the first summer of the Shakespeare Festival. That was when my big brother David and my big sister Robin were cast as the two “princes in the tower” in Richard III. They wore tights, jerkins, capes, and floppy velvet hats. They even got to speak a few lines. Apparently I was too young for a speaking part. But I wasn’t too young to be stricken with sibling envy.

The second summer was no better. Brother David got to play Lucius, the serving boy to Brutus, in Julius Caesar. Brutus was played by my father. One sweltering matinee day, David was queasy with stomach flu. A half hour before the performance, he asked to be excused. In a near tirade, my father attempted to instill in him the notion that “the show must go on.” David acceded. He played Lucius that day, waiting on his father and struggling mightily to keep from vomiting into the bushes in front of a packed house. But after that, he never wanted to act again.

In time, my beloved brother Dave would craft his own version of my father’s vagabond lifestyle. It had nothing to do with the theater. Boy and man, David’s exuberance and animation always verged on the hyperactive. Hungrily inquisitive, a loquacious talker, and a demon for speed and exercise, he figuratively and literally took flight from the family business. He fell in love with flying. All the passion, intelligence, and energy that he might have poured into a career onstage he channeled elsewhere. He chose a life of aviation — as an Air Force pilot, an international airline captain, and an official of the FAA. Lucius in Julius Caesar was his swan song, at the tender age of twelve. And there was I, sitting in the audience with my sister, dying, dying, to go on in his place.

The next summer, I finally got my chance. The season included A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I was tapped to play Mustardseed, one of Titania’s entourage of fairies (sister Robin was cast as Moth). I searched the script and was thrilled to discover that Mustardseed actually had lines. Lines! For the first time I would speak onstage! There were only seven lines in all, and none contained more than four words (the longest was “Where shall we go?” spoken in unison with the other three fairies), but this took nothing away from the exhilaration of that moment.

As with Sleeping Beauty, my costume was an issue. In its first incarnation, it consisted of a long-sleeved, bright-yellow leotard and a hat made of yellow fake fur. The hat was a miraculous creation. It had the shape of a tall seed pod, fastened under my chin and pointing straight up, rising two feet above my head. The dazzling yellow of the costume was set off by bronze-colored body makeup on my bare, spindly legs and several square inches of bold blue greasepaint around my eyes. I absolutely loved the look. As I took the stage at the dress rehearsal, I was Mustardseed incarnate.

Courtesy Yellow Springs News.

The next day, on the afternoon of our opening night, I walked into the company’s big communal dressing room, eagerly searching for my costume. I was shattered by what I found. At the dress rehearsal, the leotard had been judged to be too bright under the stage lights, so it had been unceremoniously splattered with black paint to cut down the glare. This was bad enough. But the fate of my glorious hat was even worse. “Too showy,” the director had decided. Just like the leotard, the hat had been splattered with black paint. And to my even greater horror, it had been cut down to half its size! “What is it,” I must have wondered, “about me and hats?”

The woman who designed my androgynous Mustardseed getup also designed every other costume that summer. Of everyone who worked at the festival in all those years, she has emerged as perhaps the greatest star. She is the Oscar-winning costumer Ann Roth, who designed the clothes for The English Patient, The Birdcage, and over a hundred other plays and films. In 1981, we had occasion to work together again. She designed my entire wardrobe for the role of the transsexual Roberta Muldoon in The World According to Garp. In one of my last appearances in the film, you may remember that I am wearing a stunning, broad-brimmed black hat.

Standing onstage at age seven in my first scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the most potent memories of my childhood. Oberon and Titania, the king and queen of the fairies, are quarreling over a mortal “changeling boy.” In essence, it is a Shakespearean take on a hostile child-custody case. Poetry pours forth from both characters as Shakespeare seems to swoon at the chance to write dialogue for fairy royalty. And there I stood, half-forgetting that I was in a play, drinking it all in — the moonlit night, the pungent summer air, the cool breeze, the warm glow of stage lights, the distant shriek of cicadas, and the mysterious, half-lit faces of the audience, hanging on every word.

And such words! They washed over me in waves, unamplified and gorgeously spoken, especially in the honeyed baritone of Earle Hyman as Oberon. At age seven, I barely knew what any of those phrases meant, but their sheer beauty enthralled me. Years later, in my mid-teens, my father took me to a matinee of a touring production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hanna Theatre in Cleveland. He had a couple of old friends in the cast, so for him it was an obligatory visit. But for me it was an afternoon of intense discovery.

I hadn’t seen the play since that summer when I played Mustardseed. On this day in Cleveland, as I watched all of the fairy scenes, I was transported back to my childhood. I listened to every line as if it were half- remembered music. But this time, there was a kind of electric shock of recognition as I connected with Shakespeare’s language. This time I knew what they were saying! I suddenly understood the chemical reaction between poetry and emotion, acted out onstage. My excitement was so keen that it almost matched the thrill of witnessing one of the greatest comic performances I had ever seen, or have seen since. In the role of Bottom the Weaver, I got to see Bert Lahr.

Oh yes, Shakespeare could make you laugh. Nobody knew that better than Bert Lahr. I once mentioned to his son, New Yorker critic John Lahr, that I’d seen his father play Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. John told me that Bert had wanted to do the role for a very simple reason. Bottom draws a sword in the comic play-within-a-play toward the end of Act V. Bert had seen this as an opportunity to have his pants accidentally fall down around his ankles. This was comedy gold for an old vaudevillian. And I saw it happen! Bert Lahr drew his sword, his pants fell down, and the audience laughed for about five minutes. Eventually everyone onstage laughed, too. From the audience, I noticed Lahr mutter something to the other actors. They laughed even harder. After the show, I asked one of those actors what Lahr had said to them, in the midst of that torrent of laughter from the crowd. He’d said, “Let’s wear them out.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d seen an antic character stop the show in a Shakespeare comedy. I can still picture so many moments of hilarity that I watched from my seat at the Antioch Festival. I see Petruchio waging a food fight, Sir Andrew Aguecheek waggling his sword, Dogberry cavorting with his night watchmen, like so many Keystone Kops. And I see my father, in my favorite of all his roles, staggering around as the drunken butler Stefano in The Tempest. These riotous performances represent my first lessons in the vulgar art of making people laugh.

One summer during those years, when I was twelve years old, I had the chance to put those lessons to work. The occasion was the big show on the last night of a week of Boy Scout camp, with hundreds of raucous boys in attendance. Our troop had been chosen to put on a skit. We had come up with a ten-minute version of the