Drama: An Actor's Education

313 Pages·2011·9.44 MB·English

by  John Lithgow

DRAMA
An Actor’s Education
John Lithgow
Dedication
To Mary
Contents
Dedication

Preface
[1] A Curious Life
[2] A Kiss on the Neck
[3] Lachryphobia
[4] The Good Boy
[5] Enter Messenger
[6] The Beefeater
[7] Most Creative
[8] Big and Little
[9] Curtains
[10] Pinch Me
[11] Veritas
[12] Utopia
[13] Hard Times on the Great Road
[14] Three Lincolns
[15] This Scepter’d Isle
[16] D Group Days
[17] Getting Out
[18] Coming Home
[19] The Triumph of Nepotism
[20] Much Ado
[21] Reality
[22] Induced Insecurity
[23] A Fork in the Road
[24] Naked
[25] Mr. Pleasant
[26] Broadway Baby
[27] Adolescence
[28] My Biggest Mistake
Coda

Acknowledgments
About the Author

Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
I
n the summer of 2002, my father was eighty-six years old. He’d been the
picture of health all his life, but that summer he started to have some serious
medical problems. There was an operation that could address these problems,
but his doctors wanted to avoid it if at all possible. The operation involved major
abdominal surgery, and they were afraid that it might be too much for an old
man’s system. But finally there was no choice. His health was plummeting and
his doctors decided that, to save him, they would have to operate. So a date was
set, and on the morning he went into surgery, the family was told that he had
only a fifty-percent chance of surviving it. These were scary words, of course.
But in fact he did survive it, and we all breathed a huge, collective sigh of relief.
But by the time he was discharged from the hospital, we had started to worry
all over again. The operation had taken its toll. It had weakened him terribly and
had drastically slowed him down. Worst of all, it had taken away his spirit. This
genial man, with his impish humor and his boisterous laugh, fell silent and
plunged into a deep depression. It didn’t help that he and my eighty-four-year-
old mother lived alone, with nobody looking after them. For years my brother,
my two sisters, and I had repeatedly offered to set them up in a retirement
community, but they had refused to even consider it. Instead they had ended up
in a condo of their own choosing, outside of Amherst, Massachusetts, living like
a little old couple in a cabin in the woods in a Grimm’s fairy tale. And when my
mother drove my father home from the hospital, that’s where she took him.
There they were: my father struggling to convalesce, my mother struggling to
take care of him—and she wasn’t in such great shape, either. It was a
catastrophe. Something had to be done.
Of us four siblings, I was the only one out of work. I had time on my hands.
So with my wife’s encouragement, I dropped everything, flew across the
country, and moved in with my parents. My task was simple. I would tend to my
father, help out my mother, organize Dad’s postoperative therapies, and figure
out some system of ongoing care for both of them. The plan was for me to stay
with them for exactly one month and have everything nicely in order by the time
I left. I can do this, I thought. It’ll be easy.
It wasn’t. The first few days I was there, I practically fell apart. The situation
was far worse than I had expected. I saw immediately that I was going to have to
take care of my father, a frail old man, as if he were a little baby. He was too
weak to sit up in bed. He was tormented by bedsores and a baby’s burning diaper
rash. He couldn’t stand or walk without help. He couldn’t get to the dining room
table, let alone manage a bathtub, a shower, or a toilet. Worst of all, he had been
sent home from the hospital with terse instructions to painstakingly change his
own catheter, reinserting it every day, and to keep careful, written records of the
workings of his own internal plumbing—at eighty-six years old! It was my job
to help him through all of this, and I didn’t know what I was doing. I was in way
over my head, it was exhausting work, and it was unbearably sad. Every night I
would get on the phone to my wife, back home in Los Angeles, and just sob.
The days passed and things improved. But they didn’t improve much. My
mother, my father, and I gradually fell into a predictable routine. I fixed their
meals. I took Dad on short, halting constitutional walks. I bathed him, powdered
him, and got rid of that awful rash. He’d gotten shabby and unkempt, so I
trimmed his nails, shaved his stubbly beard, and cut his stringy hair. I prodded
him to tell sunny stories of his early days and his young years with my mom. I
coaxed him into word games and crosswords. I stumped him with scraps of
Shakespearean trivia—anything, anything to cheer him up. But nothing worked.
He made listless, halfhearted attempts to indulge me and my strenuous
diversions, but nothing dispelled his feelings of gloom and doom. He felt tired
and forgotten. He felt his life wasted and misspent. He’d lost his will to live.
Without it, he was clearly not going to last much longer. I felt as if my mother
and I were helplessly monitoring the slow decline of an old man who had just
given up.
Then one day, halfway through my time with them, I had an idea. It was an
idea that bubbled up through the soft-focus haze of my childhood, fifty years
before. It was one of the best ideas I ever had.
In my grade-school years, my family moved a lot. There was an old burnt-
orange sofa that traveled with us everywhere we went. That humble piece of
furniture figures in some of the fondest memories of my youth. It was where I
first heard stories. My siblings and I would cuddle up to my father on that sofa at
bedtime and he would read to us. He read the comics in the newspaper with near
religious regularity. He read Kipling’s The Jungle Book, a chapter a night. He
read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol every year on Christmas Eve. He read doggerel
poems by Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and Ogden Nash from a set of bright-