Drama: An Actor's Education

things were not so simple. His days were now encumbered by frequent treks between his parents’ two apartments, by the terse, angry exchanges between the two of them, by the blunt questions of his schoolmates, and by the earnest looks of concern on the faces of his best friends’ mothers. Jean and I struggled to compensate for all these new burdens he carried. We worked harder than ever to make his life active and fun. All things considered, he managed his difficulties extremely well, soldiering on with a good-natured fortitude and courage that belied his young years. But even his best times were tinged with melancholy. He clearly longed for Jean and me to get back together, to restore the Eden of his younger days. But he was too young to understand that this was never going to happen.

A marriage had come to an end. The change left the three of us reeling. For each of us, every day was a battle to dispel the gloom. But in the midst of all the pain, I sensed that my life had changed for the better. The same could not be said for Jean or Ian. The separation had been a bitter blow to both of them. In time we would all walk away from the train wreck of my late adolescence, but their injuries would take longer to heal. They continued to grieve for a past that was gone forever. Their grief saddened me as well. But despite it, and despite the grim loneliness of my solitary life, I was not looking backwards. I was looking ahead. In my homely little flat, I slowly taught myself the rudiments of self-sufficiency and self-knowledge. I put my adolescence behind me and wearily embraced adulthood at last. I was patiently waiting for my next chapter to begin.

[28] My Biggest Mistake

Choices can drive an actor nuts. Having to choose between two job offers is a high-class problem, to be sure. Most actors spend their days pining for even one. But if a choice is a luxury, it can also be a torment. We actors are always looking for the main chance, the big break, the next rung on the illusory ladder of success. When a choice presents itself, a broad range of considerations comes into play — the roles, the material, the venues, the visibility, the other talent, the artistic fulfillment, the dough. The most compelling factor is the mysterious signal that comes from your gut: What do you really want to do? But sometimes the answer to that question is maddeningly difficult to formulate. Choosing between two jobs (not to mention three or four) necessarily means turning something down. Faced with a major choice, every actor is haunted by the dire scenario of declining a role that then brings undreamt-of glory to some other actor. I myself must hold the record for the most Tony Awards won by actors in roles that I’ve turned down. Inherent in every choice is the potential for making a terrible mistake. In the course of his career, an actor tiptoes through a minefield of such mistakes. In the fall of 1979, in choosing my last acting job of the decade, I made a whopper.

In the spring of that year, I participated in a reading of a new play at Joe Papp’s downtown Public Theater. It was an interesting play with an arresting title: Salt Lake City Skyline. The play was a loosely historical reenactment of the trial leading up to the 1915 execution of Joe Hill, the radical union organizer. It was written by one of Papp’s in-house playwrights, a contemporary of mine named Thomas Babe. Tom had been a friend at Harvard, although I had never worked with him there. Along with my old rival Timothy Mayer, he had been codirector of that long-ago Harvard summer theater that I had spurned in favor of my doomed Great Road Players in Princeton. At the time of the play reading, Joe Papp was in his glory years. If he summoned you to read a play, you showed up. But I was also eager to do a favor for Tom Babe, a man I liked and admired, in an effort to bury an old hatchet.

The reading was unexpectedly powerful. Ten good actors had been assembled for the occasion. I read the lead role of the immigrant Joe Hill, in a Swedish accent that owed a good deal to my recent friendship with a certain Norwegian film star. The other major role in the play was the sentencing judge from the Joe Hill trial. It was played by the dour, ironic, and very imposing Fred Gwynne, the only actor I had ever shared a stage with who was taller than I was. Typical of such occasions, the cast read through the script once in a Public Theater rehearsal studio. Then about thirty of the Public’s friends and staff members filed in and we performed the play full-out, standing before our little audience at a row of black music stands. At the play’s climax, the judge dolefully sings the anthemic union ballad “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” then BANG! Joe Hill is shot by a firing squad. Blackout. As the reading drew to an end, we could hear sniffles and muffled sobs. When it was over the crowd applauded strenuously and tearfully. I had asked my big brother, David, to come to the reading that day. He still remembers it as one of the most moving moments of theater he has ever seen. Unrehearsed play readings can sometimes have that effect.

A few months after we did that downtown reading, I went back to work on Broadway. I joined the cast of Peter Hall’s production of Bedroom Farce at the Brooks Atkinson on Forty-seventh Street. That show’s producer was Robert Whitehead, one of the great gentlemen of the New York theater. In his day, Bob had produced such historic Broadway fare as The Member of the Wedding, A Man for All Seasons, and the premieres of four major plays by Arthur Miller. With his impeccable suits, his urbane mustache, and his mane of white hair, Bob radiated class. Late in the run of Bedroom Farce, he came to my dressing room. He was giddy with good news. He was all set to produce the American premiere of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal for Broadway. Peter Hall himself was slated to direct it, having just staged it in London to loud acclaim. Roy Scheider and Blythe Danner were already cast in it. Bob breathlessly announced that Hall wanted me to play Jerry, rounding out the three characters. This was wonderful news, of course, but Bob took more pleasure in delivering it than I took in receiving it. Joe Papp, you see, wanted to mount Salt Lake City Skyline at the Public Theater at the very same time. Even as Bob spoke, I could feel the burden of choice descending on my shoulders.

Joe Papp was the very opposite of Robert Whitehead. If Bob was a Broadway aristocrat, Joe was a Lower East Side street tough. Since the late 1950s, he had built the New York Shakespeare Festival from a downtown church basement workshop into an indispensable American institution. Having introduced free Shakespeare in Central Park in 1962, he had since grabbed hold of the enormous Astor Library on Lafayette Street and turned it into the Public, a sprawling, splendidly renovated five-theater incubator of new American plays and musicals. A list of productions begotten at the Public reads like a history of New York theater in the last thirty years of the twentieth entury. Such Tony-winning creations as That Championship Season, A Chorus Line, and Hair only scratch the surface of his prodigious output.

This miraculous body of work was the result of a unique good cop/bad cop management partnership at the top of Joe’s organization. The good cop was his producing partner, a genial and warmly persuasive man named Bernard Gersten. The bad cop was Joe himself, a charismatic, irascible, fearless, mercurial, and frequently impossible man to deal with. He had a kind of genius for throwing people off guard and bending them to his will. To that end, he cultivated a complex love-hate relationship with everyone who worked with him, including even Bernie Gersten himself. The first time I met Joe had been years before, at a Shakespeare audition in a rehearsal room at the Public. In front of six or eight staffers, he greeted me that day with a booming voice, cigar in hand:

“John Lithgow! The son who has outstripped his father, as every son must!”

Zap! By some sixth sense, he had found my emotional sore spot and plunged a needle straight into it. I was stunned and confused. On the one hand, he was complimenting my nascent success. On the other, he was airily dismissing my father’s entire life’s work, without knowing a thing about my relationship with him. I was frozen in place, caught somewhere between flattery and outrage. Just like that, Joe Papp had me right where he wanted me. A man like that is incredibly hard to say no to.

And there I was, years later, caught between Bob Whitehead and Joe Papp, between Broadway and downtown, between Harold Pinter and Thomas Babe, between Betrayal and Salt Lake City Skyline. I twisted myself into knots trying to decide between the two jobs. I spoke on the phone with Bob Whitehead, who was incredulous that I would even consider turning down Betrayal. Then I spoke to Joe, who did a classic Joe Papp number on me:

“Whaddya wanna do another English play for? That’s all y’been doing! You’re an American! You should be playing an American! Everybody thinks you’re a limey!”—(this, notwithstanding the fact that Joe Hill was a Swede).