Beacon Journal Pop Culture Writer
In May 1961, the board of Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens ousted its director, Arthur Lithgow, after less than two years in the post. Fifty years later, the incident remains powerful in the memory of Arthur’s son John.
“I was left with an abiding, lifelong suspicion of small-bore civic boosters, genteel pseudo-aristocrats, conniving garden club mavens, and Ohio Republicans,” John, 65, says in his new memoir, Drama: An Actor’s Education. He further says that his memories of Akron may be dreamlike “because, in all these years, I’ve never been back.”
Cover of John Lithgow's book "Drama."
John is, of course, the actor who starred in 3rd Rock From the Sun, Dexter, Terms of Endearment and countless stage productions, picking up five Emmys, two Tonys and two Oscar nominations along the way. Noticing a copy of Drama during a recent visit to Cleveland, actor Martin Sheen praised Lithgow’s acting skills.
The book, which will be published on Tuesday, chronicles Lithgow’s acting education and personal changes, with an emphasis on stage work. Last year, before an appearance in Cleveland, John insisted that he is fundamentally a stage actor. Some of those acting roots formed in Akron, to which Lithgow devotes two of his book’s 28 chapters. In Akron, he wrote, “events would begin to propel me, without my even knowing it, toward a career in theater.”
By the time the family arrived in Akron in 1959, John had already experienced numerous upheavals in his family as Arthur — himself an actor and director — moved from job to job.
John walked on a stage for the first time in 1947, when he was 2, as an urchin in The Emperor’s New Clothes in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Arthur was on the Antioch College faculty and producing plays. After Yellow Springs came Oak Bluffs, Mass.; Waterville, Ohio; Stockbridge, Mass.; then Akron, with more moves to follow. The New York Times, in Arthur’s 2004 obituary, called him “a pioneer in American regional theater,” and he was the founder of what is now the Great Lakes Theater Festival.
Some moves were less welcome than others. Told he was leaving Stockbridge, John found himself standing in the middle of a field and shouting, “WHY ME?! WHY AKRON?!” But he also recalls being very successful in school (Simon Perkins for ninth grade, Buchtel for 10th) and his ambitions to be an artist were helped by teachers like Fran Robinson, “one of the best teachers I ever had.”
Then there was Shakespeare.
Arthur had already been staging the Bard around Ohio and he presented a summer Shakespeare festival at Stan Hywet in 1960. John had “my first line spoken onstage as a grown-up actor” as a French messenger in Henry V, and found a mentor in the character actor Donald Moffat. “In the next few years,” John says, “theater gradually seduced me away from art.”
Still, any bliss onstage masked troubles off. A 1959 Beacon Journal story called the Hall Foundation “financially shaky.” To save money, Arthur made his own repairs to the heating plant in the coach house, where the Lithgows lived. On the other hand, John concedes, Arthur gave “only a nod to the everyday business of Stan Hywet” while focusing on the festival.
There were also cultural conflicts among the hall’s boosters. After Arthur was fired, a Beacon Journal story alluded to “board factions who wanted to keep Stan Hywet as a museum, and others who wanted it as a living center for cultural activities.” It was almost a 50-50 split between the two sides. John, in his memoir, focuses on the naysayers, “pillars of wealthy Akron society” who felt a Shakespeare festival “had no place in their grand design.
“Massive lighting towers on the back terrace? … Sweaty, scrofulous young men in nothing but shorts and sandals, rehearsing noisy outdoor battle scenes. … This would not do.”
In 1961, not long before a planned second season of Shakespeare, the hall trustees voted to fire Arthur and to cancel the festival; the supposed reason, as one report said, was “lack of money.” But the votes were close, 14-13 on each issue. While John’s anger about the situation has lasted, his indictment of Akron should not be all-encompassing.
For one thing, John concedes in his book that it was only about half of the trustees who disliked Arthur’s plans. A Beacon Journal editorial at the time said the votes “will sadden thousands of Akronites who have had high hopes that the castlelike Tudor mansion of the Seiberlings might become a valuable cultural center for the community.”
The vote indicated “that Stan Hywet’s future will be largely as a showplace for tourists,” the editorial added, and “it is regrettable that the small majority of trustees feel that Akron can’t afford [Arthur’s] constructive influence.”
The newspaper also gave considerable coverage to Arthur’s second season of Shakespeare, which went ahead without Stan Hywet.
Feeling obliged to keep his contractual commitments, Arthur staged the 1961 festival in the Ohio Theater in Cuyahoga Falls, “a derelict, run-down, four-hundred seat theater perched on the edge of a gorge,” as John remembers it. It was also the first home of the ministry of Rex Humbard, who had by then relocated and let the festival use the hall rent-free.
John was on the stage crew for the festival. Photos from the time also show his sister Robin at work. John got “my first substantial piece of acting on a professional stage” as a Beefeater in a workshop production of George Bernard Shaw’s The Dark Lady of the Sonnets. After the second season ended, the family moved again, to Princeton, N.J., where Arthur joined the staff of the McCarter Theatre.
But before they left, there was a great moment, one that taught John a lesson “that has stayed with me ever since.”
The moment was Arthur’s. The company was staging The Taming of the Shrew and the actor playing Petruchio would be unavailable for a night. Arthur, who had played the role before, planned to replace him. But by the time the night came, Arthur was already playing Baptista, after the actor cast for that part had left. The two characters appear in some scenes together.
Arthur arranged for a coat rack and a full-length black coat, and played both parts. He played Baptista in an orange hat and the cloak; for Petruchio, he removed the cloak and hat, putting them on the rack. “Then he and every other character would relate to the coat rack as if it were Baptista, still onstage with them,” John says. When Petruchio was supposed to exit, Arthur would put back on the hat and cloak, and continue as Baptista.
Arthur explained the trick before the play began, went about his business and “the crowd ate it up.” And John learned that lesson: “Make a pact with an audience, and they’ll follow you anywhere.”
Even in Akron.
Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal and in the HeldenFiles Online blog at http://heldenfels.ohio.com and on Facebook and on Twitter. He also does a weekly video chat for Ohio.com. He can be reached at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com
http://the330.com/on-screen/john-lithgow-recalls-akron-years-in-new-memoir-3/
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