Drama: An Actor's Education

by John Lithgow

  I couldn’t see into the future, of course, so I had no way of knowing. But looking back, it is perfectly obvious: in that first show of the summer I had created the precursor to Dr. Emilio Lizardo in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, far and away my most outrageous screen performance, and, secretly, one of my favorites.

  In a larger sense, that summer I was creating a template for the wildly varied range of roles that would unfold over the next several decades in my checkerboard acting career. Every actor weaned on Shakespeare inevitably emerges as a character actor. Shakespeare’s plays shift briskly from one genre to the next. In Hamlet, when Polonius speaks of the arrival of traveling players and of the plays they perform—“tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral . . . tragical-comical-historical-pastoral”—he could be describing Shakespeare’s own output. Hence an actor in a Shakespearean troupe becomes accustomed to abrupt mood swings, night by night, between romance, heroism, horror, and lunatic farce. He develops a taste for this constant change of pace, and the more radical the changes the better. On any given night in my two seasons in Lakewood, I could be a crotchety uncle, a cowardly French soldier, a sadistic courtier, an Egyptian eunuch, a cockney thief, a foolish aristocrat arrested in a brothel, and, yes, a crackpot conjuror. I went through ten pounds of greasepaint, wore out a dozen costumes, and had the time of my life.

  These two summer seasons put me into a heightened new relationship with my father. The air was thick with Oedipal complexity. I was his employee now, one of a gang of working actors who were not always happy campers. Most were veterans of several seasons with my father. They liked and respected him, but they were far from reverential. Of the twelve plays that I appeared in, Dad directed half. For the first time, I watched him at work, up close and personal. I witnessed his interactions within his own company, I compared him with other directors, and I took his measure. The festival’s workaday routine and the actors’ occasional grumbling took their toll on my filial idolatry. My high estimation of him never flagged, but, in my eyes, his untarnished image gradually gave way to a much more realistic picture. I began to see his undeniable strengths counterbalanced by weaknesses that I’d never quite noticed.

  In general, my father’s directorial modus operandi was to find the best actors he could get, put them together with a slate of Shakespeare’s plays, and just let ’er rip. Such an approach was daring but dodgy. By any rational standard, he scheduled too many productions in too little time, requiring plays as complex and demanding as Hamlet to be mounted in as few as eight days. Besides, the quality of acting in the ensemble was wildly inconsistent. As a consequence, it was almost impossible to achieve a consistent company style. By necessity, Dad’s direction tended toward the “louder/faster” school. A lot of attention was given to the breakneck pace of the dialogue and the running time of the entire play. He was even known to bring a kitchen timer to rehearsals and require that scenes finish before the timer went off. When he was directing, our workdays were supercharged with his genial, positive energy, but there was little time given to subtlety or detail. He was impatient with close textual analysis, nuances of character, emotional truth, or historical context. Indeed, his most frequent direction to his actors was to face the audience, fill up your lungs, and “just speak the words!” For him, Shakespeare carried a kind of biblical weight, an almost magical power. He fervently believed that if you just speak the words, everything else will fall into place.

  If Dad’s “faith-based” approach was sometimes haphazard and off-key, it often paid miraculous dividends. His passion for Shakespeare’s work was infectious, and the youthful energy and raw talent of his actors often carried the day. And every once in a while, watching him at work like a bench player eyeing his coach from the sidelines, I would witness flashes of genuine brilliance.

  In Romeo and Juliet I was cast in the trifling role of the Second Musician, so I had plenty of time to watch. A day before our first performance, the cast was plowing through a daytime dress rehearsal. Things were not going well, but my father, sitting in the dark at the back of the house, was letting the actors struggle through the play without stopping. I sat in the first row, watching the sodden production lurch from scene to scene. Chiefly responsible for the theatrical doldrums up onstage was the actor playing Romeo. He had a flowery name, six syllables long, but I’ll call him Devereaux. Devereaux was a vain, baby-faced pretty boy, consumed with narcissistic self-regard. His favorite pastime was sitting languorously at his makeup table for an hour before every show, staring at himself in the mirror, his face framed by a whole gallery of photographs of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. As Romeo, Devereaux’s coiffed blond hair, meticulous mascara, and fey, self-styled costume were far more important to him than his character’s impetuous flesh-and-blood passions. Romeo’s scalding love for Juliet was barely an afterthought.

  As I sat and watched the dress rehearsal that day, Romeo and Juliet began their famous balcony scene. Five minutes into it, Dad broke his resolve to let the cast slog through to the end. He unfolded himself, stood up, and walked all the way down the aisle, bringing the two actors to a halt. He put aside his notes and began to speak, his demeanor exuding an eerie forced calm. With an almost canine sensitivity, I recognized that tone in his voice. I shifted in my seat, sensing a gathering storm. He directed all of his words toward Devereaux. They were carefully chosen and enunciated, as if he were composing an academic essay.

  “The problem with the production as it now stands,” he began, “is that it has no Romeo.”

  That quiet declaration hit Devereaux like a rifle shot. He lowered himself to the floor, carefully arranging his powder-blue cape with its dainty pink piping. His eyes were glassy and his body slumped as my father’s gentle critique slowly built in intensity. Peppering his speech with quotes from the text, he described Romeo’s renegade sexuality, his hotheaded irrationality, his feverish fixation on Juliet. With every sentence he grew louder, more passionate, almost angry. Within minutes, his helpful prodding had bloomed into a full-blown tirade.

  “If this Romeo tried to vault Juliet’s fence,” he bellowed, “he’d break his stick! If he climbed in bed with her, he wouldn’t know what to do! That’s not Romeo! Love for Romeo is not flowers and perfume. It’s urgent, it’s sweaty. He’s an animal! He’s carnivorous! So is Juliet! If he doesn’t have fire in his loins, then neither does she! You’re giving the other actors onstage nothing! Romeo is not there! And without Romeo, the whole play is as limp as a limp dick!”

  I had never seen my father like this. Witnessing his tantrum, I was frozen in my seat, caught between anxiety and relief. I hated to see Devereaux treated so ruthlessly, but I was enormously relieved to see him finally getting the thrashing he needed. His passion spent, Dad instructed Romeo and Juliet to begin the scene again from the top and then strode back to his seat. Devereaux had been shaken to the core, but he climbed to his feet, shook his head and his hands, and began again. The second time through, the scene was transformed. Devereaux never grew into a great Romeo, and the entire play never quite caught fire. But my father’s harsh medicine had been both necessary and effective. From that moment on, Devereaux, Romeo, and the production itself were all mightily improved.

  That day I felt that I had seen my father at his very best. His love of Shakespeare and his passion for theater were abundantly on display. He filled me with admiration and pride. Questions hung in the air, of course. Why did he wait until dress rehearsal to tear apart an actor’s performance? Why did he allow Romeo to wear that awful costume, makeup, and hairdo? Why was such a fatuous actor ever cast in the first place? Besides compromising the production, wasn’t this a cruel disservice to the actor himself? Such questions went to the very heart of my father’s strengths as a theater manager. But as I sat watching him in that darkened auditorium, either those questions didn’t occur to me or I scrupulously ignored them. And why should I have cared, anyway? What emotional investment did I have? After all, this was not my career. I wasn’t going to be an ac
tor. This was a lark, a fun summer before I went off to college. It was years before I asked all those questions about my father. When I finally did, the answers would weigh heavily on me.

  [11]

  Veritas

  The dreams of an artist die hard. Despite all the fun of my first season with the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, I was still nursing ambitions of being a painter. And so it was that, halfway through my freshman year at college, I set my sights on Skowhegan, Maine, for the upcoming summer. As it is today, Skowhegan was the site of a summer-long art school and the seasonal retreat for a whole colony of high-powered New York painters. In my dorm room I filled out an application, typed out a brief essay, assembled slides of drawings and paintings from my Art Students League days, and sent off the whole package. I was bursting with high hopes and creative zeal. What with the hectic frenzy of the summer festival and the crushing workload of my freshman year, my artistic output had slowed to a trickle. I was counting on a meditative summer in Maine to get it going again. In the weeks after I mailed my application, I awaited word.

  While I waited, I went home to my family in Princeton for Spring Break. On my first day back, my father had a bright idea. Since arriving at McCarter Theatre, he had made the acquaintance of Ben Shahn, an authentic American master of painting and printmaking whose home and studio were in nearby Roosevelt, New Jersey. For years Shahn had been a summertime fixture at Skowhegan and a dominating presence at the art school there. To boost my chances of admission, Dad called up Shahn himself and asked if I could visit his studio to talk to him about the summer program. Shahn said yes, and a few days later Dad and I drove out to Roosevelt to meet with him.

  When we walked into his bright, airy studio, the bespectacled Shahn was working on a series of small watercolors. He was enthroned like a pasha, surrounded by a happy clutter of drawings, paintings, photos, and art supplies. Afternoon sun poured in the windows, filtered through the spring leaves of birch trees out in his yard. Mozart played softly on the radio. I took in the scene with awe and envy. It was everything I had dreamed of: a serene creative idyll, perfectly conducive to the unfettered flow of art.

  But Ben Shahn himself was anything but serene. In his late sixties, he had the big head, broad shoulders, meaty hands, and expansive girth of a longshoreman. He spoke in a deep growl and his manner was brusque. His defiant, left-leaning politics, frequently expressed in his social realist paintings, seemed to color his every word and gesture. He needled and challenged me, rabbinically testing my fiber with irascible good humor. The questions came thick and fast. What have you done? Where have you studied? Whose work do you like? Why do you want this? What do you aspire to? Where do you stand? I burbled my earnest answers, feeling utterly intimidated and inadequate. Then came the biggest question of all:

  “If you want to be an artist,” he barked, “what the hell are you doing at Harvard?”

  I went to Harvard because I got in. This is not the best reason to pick a college, but in retrospect, it’s the best reason I can come up with. In those days, to an even greater extent than today, the very word “Harvard” represented the pinnacle of high school achievement, the ultimate flatterer of a seventeen-year-old’s vanity. The heady aura of the place swept aside all other considerations. This was still the era of Jack Kennedy’s pre-Dallas Camelot, and the place shimmered with his reflected glory. Admittance to Harvard was a gilded invitation to join the company of the best and the brightest, long before that phrase had taken on its dark, ironic overtones. If you got in, you went, simple as that. My letter of admission arrived, I accepted without hesitation, and the following September I arrived in Cambridge and moved into Wigglesworth Hall, my freshman dorm, in the shadow of Widener Library. I was a newly minted Harvard undergraduate, Class of 1967, without knowing a thing about the place and, in fact, without ever having laid eyes on it.

  From the moment I arrived at Harvard, I sensed something in the air. It emanated from the moist red bricks of Sever Hall. You heard it in the Brahmin drawls of the all-male undergrads. You saw it in the lazy waggle of their cigarettes and the droopy forelocks of their unbarbered hair. You could practically smell it on their damp tweed sport coats and crimson wool scarves. It was a certain indefinable culture of languid male success, an unspoken awareness that having gained access, you were expected to effortlessly excel, both at Harvard and beyond. Everyone there bore these great expectations in one of two ways: they either regarded them as a mantle of privilege or as an onerous burden. This made the Harvard men of those days highly susceptible to virulent strains of self-importance, self-doubt, self-contempt, or some complex combination of all three. However you responded to the pressures of the place, one thing was clear: to thrive at Harvard, or even to survive there, you must stake out some domain where you can succeed, and move into it like an invading army.

  It didn’t take me long to find mine.

  By centuries-old tradition, Harvard turned up its nose to formal training in the arts, an attitude that is only just giving way in this day and age. And yet its student body at any given moment has always been packed with students of exceptional talent, ready to pour their energies into extracurricular artistic activity. How else can you explain the long list of career artists that Harvard has produced over the years: Robert Frost, Leonard Bernstein, Alan Jay Lerner, Arthur Kopit, Jack Lemmon, Pete Seeger, and John Updike from earlier generations; and more recently Yo-Yo Ma, Terrence Malick, Christopher Durang, Bonnie Raitt, John Adams, Peter Sellars, pianist Ursula Oppens, sax player Josh Redman, and movie stars Natalie Portman and Matt Damon. All of these notables were feverishly active in the arts at Harvard. Only one or two of them actually studied their discipline there.

  Read over that list again. You will notice a glaring omission. Not one of these impressive artists worked in the visual arts. Ben Shahn was right. You didn’t go to Harvard to paint pictures. The year before I’d arrived, Harvard had unveiled the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, a stunning piece of sweeping architecture designed by Le Corbusier. A seductive photo of the building had caught my eye the year before, when I was sifting through college literature and choosing schools. On one of my first days on campus I went inside it and snooped around its glass, steel, and concrete interior. The bright rooms were weirdly empty. The walls were covered with what looked like technical drawings, analytical design projects featuring black-ink outlines of geometrical shapes, seemingly intended to transmute fleshly art into bloodless science. By all evidence, art at the Carpenter Center had to meet some dry, academic, almost technological standard or it was disallowed. There were no paint-smeared rags, no turpentine smell, no racks of unfinished canvases, no plaster dust, no clutter, no mess. It had the feel of an art school where actual artists had been told that they need not apply. Clearly this was not the place for me. I walked out the gleaming glass doors and for the next four years I barely went back.

  That same day, I sought out another building. This one lay blocks away from Harvard Yard, crouching on Brattle Street like a mutinous exile. This was the Loeb Drama Center, a state-of-the-art two-theater playhouse entirely devoted to extracurricular dramatics. The building was only two years old but already looked comfortably lived in. The walls were lined with photos of student productions. The bulletin boards were crammed with casting calls and handbills. Coats and book bags were flung in every corner. Laughter and fast talk echoed in the halls and spilled out of the open doors of rehearsal rooms. And lolling everywhere, with an air of cocky ownership, there were students. These students, the denizens of “the Loeb,” were funky artistic types of both sexes, and included the first Harvard upperclassmen and graduate students I had ever laid eyes on. They were a breed apart from the timorous, tentative young men in jackets and ties who huddled together at meals in the Freshman Union. Taking it all in, my heart raced and creative juices pumped through my veins. I could hardly believe my good luck. In my very first week, I had found my place at Harvard.

  In the meantime, I had also found a fr
iend. He was hard to miss. He was my roommate. Weighing our histories, Harvard had housed me in Wigglesworth Hall with two other freshmen with an artistic bent. One of them was David Ansen. David and I could hardly have been more different. He hailed from Beverly Hills High School, a child of Hollywood whose father had written short films and trailers in the movie industry. In those days, David was an aspiring writer of fiction, poetry, and plays. His serious demeanor and bookishness were belied by a worldliness, sly humor, and vivid sexual history. We probably found each other equally exotic. When he walked into our dorm room for the first time, I was already there. I had staked out a corner desk and was laboring away at a woodcut, barely acknowledging his arrival. A woodcut! An hour after arriving at Harvard! Who was that strange boy? David later told me that, at first sight, he had thought I was a painfully shy hayseed from the South, invited to Harvard as part of an outreach program, there to practice and refine some kind of arcane hillbilly handicrafts. From such unpromising beginnings we soon became best friends, and we’ve been best friends ever since.

  With his Hollywood pedigree, there was absolutely nothing that David did not know about film. Within days of that first meeting, we went to a movie. It was the first of scores of films that we saw together over the next four years. He became my de facto professor of the history of film, eager to drag me to both new movies and old ones that he’d seen several times before. And what a time for an intensive movie tutorial! This was the early sixties, and our generation was drunk on cinema. Boston was dotted with revival houses, presenting an unending repertory of classic films from every era and every genre. New international movie trends kept crashing on our shores like waves. In France there was the Nouvelle Vague, in Sweden there was Ingmar Bergman, in Italy there were Fellini, De Sica, Visconti, and Antonioni. As for American filmmakers, they were on the verge of their greatest period of innovation, with Stanley Kubrick in the vanguard. Ansen was there to mark every development, trace its roots, and tell me all about it.