Drama: An Actor's Education

by John Lithgow

  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 experience in a theater. Back at McCarter, he was on hand to greet the raucous young crowds at every matinee. He even created a New Jersey Festival of High School Performing Arts, inviting the winners of drama competitions from all over the state to perform on the McCarter stage. He accomplished all of this with a seasoned producer’s ingenuity and resourcefulness. For a pittance, he purchased a couple of jalopies to serve as company cars for his cross-country junkets. He nursed them along with loving care, tinkering with their wheezing engines and alternating them for each trip. He even gave them Shakespearean monikers. The bilious green Plymouth was “Glistering Phaeton” and the faded maroon Dodge was “Plumpy Bacchus with Pink Hind.”

  As for me, I was off to yet another new school. By extraordinary good fortune, I was destined to finish off my nomadic secondary school career at Princeton High School. Of the eight public schools I attended in all those years, this one was by far the best. For eleventh and twelfth grade, my last big push en route to college, I grabbed the brass ring. My teachers there included three or four of the best I ever had. There was Henry Drewry, a vibrant, fiercely intelligent African-American young man who made electrifying connections between nineteenth-century U.S. history and our early-1960s world. There was Elizabeth Stecchini, an English teacher who bubbled over with the love of language and fine literature (and who could have been the twin sister of Fran Robinson, back in Akron). And best of the lot, there was the brilliant and hilarious Carmine Prezioso, a wildly flamboyant polyglot with the manic energy of Roberto Benigni, who somehow managed to have me speaking French at the end of my very first year of study.

  At Princeton High, I felt free to reinvent myself. My big sister, Robin, had moved on to Barnard College in New York City, heading straight from Akron to her Emerald City of Oz. I missed her, of course, but I no longer required her proximity, her moral support, or her community of bohemian girlfriends. I was on my own and I liked it. I had already reached my full height of six-foot-four, and I resembled a scrawny young Ichabod Crane, but I had finally begun to feel at home in my gangly body. Having weathered the last four or five moves, I had developed a kind of genius for fitting in, acquiring social skills worthy of a seasoned politician. I made friends instantly, with no terror and no tears. The student body at the school was a mixed bag of professors’ children, blue-collar New Jerseyites, and farm kids, and I managed to connect with all of them.

  One source of my newfound self-possession was harsh experience. By now I was an old hand at being the new kid in town. But there was another source, too, one that I was barely aware of at the time but which now strikes me as perfectly obvious. It was theater. In those difficult years prior to the Princeton move, theater had been my godsend. Time and again, it had delivered me from my shell. The Twelfth Night assembly and the Malvolio monologues, the nights in the lighting booth and the days of rehearsal, my precoci
ous comradeship with adult actors and my flirtations with Lake Erie College girls, the spear-carrying and banner-waving, the French Messenger and the Beefeater—all of these moments of performance, onstage and off, had emboldened me. If all of the old insecurities still bubbled inside me, I could at least project the appearance of a near-Clintonesque confidence and social ease.

  Armed with this theater-bred adaptability, I shot up the social hierarchy of Princeton High School with astonishing speed. And my rapid ascendancy had a clear connection to those same theatrical roots. On a Wednesday, three days after the start of school, everyone was required to enroll in one of dozens of extracurricular clubs. For me, the choice was a no-brainer. I picked the drama club, archly dubbed “The Tower Thespians.” That afternoon, I took a seat in the school auditorium as the other club members gathered. None of them sat near me. I watched as their numbers swelled to ten, twenty, thirty. I grew more and more alarmed as I looked around me. Every single Tower Thespian, everyone but me, was a girl. “What kind of a nerdy club is this?” I thought. “And how do I get out of it?” Five minutes later it was too late. They had elected me club president.

  Two days later, I was sitting in the same auditorium at a meeting of the leaders of every student organization at PHS. Two months after that, in stage whiskers and old-age makeup, I scored a personal triumph in the huge role of Noah, in the school play of the same name. Two months after that, after delivering a sly, self-mocking campaign speech to the entire student body and sweeping the two co-captains of the varsity football team in a school-wide election, I was the new president of the Princeton High School Student Council. The new kid in town had snowed everybody. By the time I graduated, my class had voted me “Most Creative,” “Most Popular,” “Most Likely to Succeed,” and “Best Dancer.” In secret, the student editor of the yearbook called to inform me of these four honorifics. She told me I had to pick just one. Still nursing my dreams of being an artist, I went for “Most Creative.”

  Photograph by Gerald Hornbein.

  Yes, in spite of all my giddy success in student theater and school politics, art remained my primary calling. But at PHS, my dogged artistic ambitions fell prey to a cruel irony. For all of its pedagogical glories, the school had awful art classes, far inferior to the ones back in Akron. At the beginning of my first year, I dutifully signed up for the single art elective. My teacher, whom I shall call Alfred Stipek, was a dark, dour bantamweight with a strictly vocational approach to his subject. My fellow art students seemed to have had no aspirations beyond print advertising and industrial design. Mr. Stipek’s dry, academic lessons seemed calculated to extinguish the slightest glimmer of artistic fire in any of us. A typical assignment was to spend three weeks doing a charcoal drawing of a plaster copy of an Egyptian sculpture of a cat. It was excruciatingly dull.

  Halfway through that semester, we were finally allowed to set aside our charcoal. Mr. Stipek set up a still life and told us that, for the next few weeks, we were to render it in colored pastels. For days I toiled over my drawing, fending off boredom as best I could. But Mr. Stipek was not happy with my technique. Where I was working in the light, sketchy style of Degas and Lautrec, he wanted me to massage the colors with my thumb, smushing them together to simulate oil paint. Whenever he walked up to my desk and repeated his instructions, I would nod obediently, then proceed as I had before, completely ignoring him. The days passed and Mr. Stipek became more testy and impatient. Finally, after about two weeks of work, he crept up behind me with a paper towel, reached across my drawing board, and violently scrubbed the entire surface of my picture. Inwardly I was shocked and enraged. But passive-aggressiveness had become my strong suit: I calmly put down the board, gathered up my things, walked out of the class, and never went back.

  This wrenching incident was a blessing in disguise. I reported it in detail to my mother, the most ardent supporter of all my creative activities. Once her maternal wrath was spent, she swung into action, researching the best art instruction outside of school. She came up with a three-hour Saturday-morning figure drawing class for teenage kids in New York City, at the venerable Art Students League of New York. Sifting through commuter schedules, she found a Trailways bus trip from Princeton to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, departing Saturdays at 7 a.m. Then she scoped out the right subway route from the Port Authority to West Fifty-seventh Street for the 9 a.m. class. The very next Saturday she fixed me a bagged lunch, drove me to the tobacco store, bought me my ticket, waited with me until the bus arrived, then dispatched me to Manhattan. By the end of that month, this solitary day-trip through central Jersey had become my regular Saturday routine, and the glamorous, clamorous, tawdry world of New York City had opened up to me like a van Gogh sunflower.

  The Art Students League never changes. It is a grand Beaux Arts rock pile, within yelling distance of Carnegie Hall. Inside, the smell of linseed oil and turpentine hangs in the air, century-old dust gathers in the corner of every studio, and the halls echo with the ghosts of New York painters from decades past. The first time I timidly stepped through its doors, this atmosphere exhilarated and intimidated me in equal measure. I was directed upstairs to a large, skylit studio, cluttered with easels and stools. These were arrayed around a low wooden platform, with space for two models. The studio was already filling up with a class of teenage art students, most of them on a Saturday-morning busman’s holiday from Manhattan’s High School of Music and Art. This young crowd was intense, driven, focused, and very talented. They scared the hell out of me. In the first seconds, my Princeton High School savoir faire evaporated. I was a frightened clam once more. I spent my first late-morning break huddled in a stall in the men’s room like a hunted animal, wolfing down my mother’s packed lunch.

  My new teacher was a far cry from the kindly, maternal Fran Robinson. She was Ethel Katz, a tough-minded Jewish woman in a drab, workmanlike smock. She was in her mid-sixties, half my height, and shaped like a cinderblock, with close-cropped gray hair and gigantic horn-rimmed glasses. Ethel was all business. That morning, without a word of greeting, she brusquely assigned me an easel and sent me downstairs with a shopping list to the in-house art-supply store. I was back to charcoal again, but this time I would be working on heavy, textured sheets of paper, and on a huge scale. And this time I would be drawing nudes.

  Photograph by Bootsy Holler.

  Nudes! I was sixteen years old, an age where anything with a curved surface was the source of runaway sexual fantasies. I had never seen a naked woman in my life and I was feverish with anticipation. I nervously adjusted my easel and pinned a sheet of paper to a drawing board, waiting for two radiant sirens to emerge from behind a screen, step onto the platform, and stand in front of me in all their seductive glory. Out they came. Clearly the wise minds at the Art Students League had had the sense to dampen the sensual enthusiasm of their teenage students. In two years of Saturday mornings, I saw a weekly parade of uniquely peculiar male and female bodies—old, fat, wizened, weathered, deformed. They were marvelous subjects for a figure drawing class but none could be called remotely attractive. All business.

  Ethel was a gruff, unsentimental, altogether marvelous teacher. She challenged me as no art teacher had before. Simple truths poured out of her, in the coarse, nasal accent of a waitress at Katz’s Delicatessen on Houston Street. Under her watchful eye, my crabbed little scrawlings became bold and dramatic, with sweeping lines filling up the frame. She taught me to visually organize the complex shapes of two naked bodies. She ordered me to keep my eyes on the models, noting my tendency to fix my gaze on my own drawing as it grew tighter and less fluid. She tore photos of athletes out of the New York Times and brought them to class as chance examples of elegant abstract composition. Like a sponge, I soaked in every word and every image, then put it all to work. At a certain point, Ethel decided I was ready to move over to the other half of the studio where she unleashed me on watercolor still lifes. My big paintings swam with brilliant, liquid color, like nothing I’d ever
dared to do before.

  In all of this, Ethel would encourage me but never compliment me. In her view, nothing was ever completely mastered. There was always something more to strive for. And this could sometimes make her downright merciless. Her most pointed critique has stayed with me ever since, resonating with every other aspect of my life. She told me one day that I had a distinct, facile talent but that I had to be watchful. My facility was my greatest asset, but it was also my greatest drawback. It allowed me to get by with glib, hasty, lazy work. Things came easy for me, so too often I was perfectly willing to skip over difficult tasks. Art is hard, she insisted. If you’re going to be great at it, you can’t fake it. Faking it, of course, is the very essence of acting. Ethel Katz may have been telling me more that day than either of us realized, and more than I wanted to hear.

  My Saturday classes at the Art Students League ended at noon. At that hour, the second half of my weekly Manhattan adventures would begin. Between midday and midnight, when the last Princeton bus pulled out of the Port Authority, the city was my oyster. Most Saturdays I would jump on the subway at Columbus Circle and head uptown to meet Robin in her Barnard dorm room. Then off we would go, to museums, galleries, art house films, and Greenwich Village coffeehouses. We occasionally tracked down beloved actors from the recent Ohio theater seasons, meeting them on their home turf. Sometimes they actually had jobs and we’d go see them act in tiny off-Broadway houses. On big occasions, Robin and I would splurge for tickets to shows we knew only from record albums in faraway Akron—The Fantasticks, The Play of Daniel, Beyond the Fringe. At one point, Robin even directed a Barnard student production of a one-act Yeats play and hired me to create masks and paint an enormous show cloth for it. New York seemed to me then, as it does to this day, a world of limitless creative energy and possibility. And experiencing it for the first time in Robin’s company sustained the brother-sister bond that we had forged in our itinerant grade-school years, worlds away from Manhattan Island.