The director of the Loeb Drama Center had taken over White House Happening and we had managed to open with no further mishaps. Despite the passion that Lincoln had poured into the project, it ended up a fairly unremarkable evening in the theater. But for me the experience was overwhelming. It taught me a frightening truth: creating theater, even not very good theater, is like working with volatile chemicals. And in the wrong combination those chemicals can burn you. For the first time I had seen a soul in agony, and that agony had arisen directly from his own emotional investment in the creative process. I had glimpsed real madness, not the pretend kind. And it was all the more poignant and pitiable to see it afflict such a warm, powerful, seemingly indomitable man. This was an acting lesson that couldn’t be taught.
Because of Lincoln Kirstein’s high profile in the cultural landscape of the nation, his play attracted far more attention than it probably should have. Critics flocked up to Cambridge to cover it, and so for the first time in my career I was reviewed in the national press. Lincoln’s notices were mostly dismissive, treating his play as something between a curiosity and a vanity project (to this day, it has never had a second production). As for me, I got one bad review and one good one. The description of me in the pages of Newsweek introduced me to the word “neurasthenic.” And the first mention I ever received in the New York Times appeared in the last sentence of a negative review written by Daniel Sullivan, their second-string critic:
“The role of Abraham Lincoln is played by John Lithgow, a young man with a future in the theatre.”
[15] This Scepter’d Isle
Halfway through my last year of college, I told my father that I was going to audition for a Fulbright grant to study acting in London. His face fell as if I’d just told him I’d contracted a terminal disease. This was hardly the response I’d expected. I had spent four summers working for him, I had played a dozen parts, I had built props, run lights, pulled curtains, and mopped the stage. I had developed friendships among his adult company members that were deeper and more lasting than any friends of my own age. My father had directed me, acted with me, and watched me perform huge roles in school plays. He’d been surprised and increasingly pleased at my growing skill and confidence. By this time, any fool could see that I was heading toward a career in the theater. I was practically addicted to it. But confronted with the reality of my choice, Dad was completely blindsided.
If my decision was a surprise to him, his disappointment was a surprise to me. Each of us had completely misread the other. In that instant, father and son experienced twin shocks stemming from two sources: his withholding nature and my blinkered naïveté. The stricken expression on his face stuck in my memory. It told of anxiety, struggle, and debilitating self-doubt. In my eyes, the theater had always been exotic, seductive, and fun. Each of my father’s companies had seemed a magical circus, with him as its insouciant ringmaster. Suddenly that image was turned on its head. I saw that a life in the theater had been harrowing for him and that he feared the same fate for me.
In the halting conversation that followed, he tried to articulate those fears. He painted a picture of the desperate insecurity of an actor’s life, the scarcity of steady work, the difficulty of providing for a family, and the unending anxiety of being subject to the whims of producers, directors, critics, and fickle crowds. He told me that, in fact, he had always imagined me as a producer-director, beholden to nobody and immune to the constant rejection that all actors must endure. If you must go into the theater, he advised, be the person in charge and acquire the skills to do it right. He confessed to his own sense of inadequacy as a theater manager, how inept he felt at the essential tasks of fundraising, budgeting, and personnel management. But all of this, he claimed, need not be a problem for me. It was acquired knowledge. I could master it as he never had. As a follow-up to my newly acquired Ivy League education, he suggested an altogether different direction.
“Why not go to business school?”
Business school? Where on earth did that come from? It was a suggestion that completely floored me. It was the first piece of direct advice my father had ever given me. It was succinct, sensible, even wise. But to me it was a message from another planet. It was like advising a poodle to become a pit bull. My brain was exploding with the absurdity of the notion, but I betrayed none of this to him. I listened, smiled, and nodded as if the idea intrigued me. But… business school? It was never going to happen. Without a word of defiance, or even skepticism, I proceeded to utterly ignore my father’s counsel. In the coming weeks and months, I perfected a speech from Richard II, I traveled to New York, I auditioned before a blue-ribbon Fulbright panel, I landed a grant, I sailed to Southampton with my wife on the second-to-last ocean crossing of the RMS Queen Mary, and I set foot for the first time on the green and pleasant land of England.
England!
Can you imagine a more thrilling time to go to England? And to go there for the very first time? In September 1967, I arrived in London, dizzy with sensory overload. This was the London of the young Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd, of Carnaby Street and Portobello Road, of James Bond, Stanley Kubrick, and Blow-Up, of the young Harold Pinter, David Hockney, Julie Christie, and Albert Finney. Gielgud, Guinness, Scofield, Ralph Richardson, and Maggie Smith were showing up regularly on the stages of the West End. Laurence Olivier was running the National Theatre. Peter Hall was passing the torch to the twenty-seven-year-old Trevor Nunn at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Peter Brook had not yet decamped for Paris. And although John and Yoko had found each other, the Beatles were still together!
And the backdrop to the electric bustle of Swinging London was the stately grandeur of Great Britain herself. Suddenly I found myself hungry for all things British. I had been studying the history and literature of England for the preceding four years, but I learned more about its society, culture, and geography in the first week that I was actually there. I had known all about characters named Cornwall, Gloucester, Northumberland, and Kent from Shakespeare’s plays, but I’d never bothered to look at a map to find the counties that bore their names. I had spouted a hundred place names in the lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan, but I’d never seen any of them, nor even knew where they were. On crisply painted row houses in leafy squares all over London, round blue ceramic plaques marked the former residences of notable figures from centuries of British politics, arts, and sciences. Charles Dickens! Benjamin Disraeli! Alexander Pope! Every hour of every day seemed to crackle with such discoveries. And at night the plummy accents on BBC broadcasts lent an air of elegance and exoticism to even the most humdrum reporting. I would avidly soak up news of a cricket test match at Lord’s, a brawl in the House of Commons, or a by-election in West Walthamstow. It barely mattered that I had no idea what any of it was all about.
My main passion, of course, was London theater. I was over there to study acting, but I saw immediately that my most vivid lessons would be delivered to me in a theater seat. My first days in London were filled with the logistical tasks of finding a cheap flat, opening a bank account, mastering the London Underground, and mustering for my first classes (and in Jean’s case, sniffing out job prospects in London schools). But no matter how packed our days were, the nights were given over to theater. With a hectic pace we were to maintain for the next two years, we sprinted around town, taking in plays like children on an Easter egg hunt.