Courtesy Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens.
For two years of my life, I lived on a fifteenth-century English estate. My backyard stretched out across a hundred acres. A vast greensward led up to a stately manor house graced with gables, parapets, Tudor beams, and hundreds of leaded-glass windows. The house had sixty rooms, including a great hall, a music room, a library, a billiard room, and a solarium. On the walls hung Old Master paintings, tapestries, armor, weaponry, and the stuffed heads of a dozen wild animals. A sycamore allée extended from the house in one direction, with seven-foot rhododendron bushes growing at the foot of the massive trees. In the other direction, a delicate birch allée led to twin gazebos overlooking meandering lagoons. There was a sunken English garden, a Japanese garden, a tennis court, and a croquet lawn. Fountains splashed in the middle of a reflecting pool below a broad back terrace. An old Scottish couple named Sandy and Annie were the deferential retainers of the household. Rangy, red-cheeked Wilbur Turberville was the affable chief groundskeeper, tending to the lawns and flower beds. Flowers were everywhere.
Despite its grandeur, the estate had fallen prey to neglect and disrepair. Less than half of its formal gardens were maintained. Scrubby trees had long since sprouted through the crumbling asphalt of the tennis court. Overgrown reeds suffocated the abandoned lagoons where two feral swans fiercely guarded their swampy domain. A couple of bedraggled peacocks occasionally strutted out into the open and pierced the air with mournful screeches. Sandy, Annie, and Wilbur were themselves ghostly holdovers from a lost era, their prosperous employers long departed.
Besides the gabled manor house, there was a gatehouse, a gardener’s cottage, and a carriage house. On the second floor of the carriage house, just above the empty stables and the porte cochère, lived the Lithgow family.
Where the hell were we now?
We were in Akron, Ohio. It was 1959. I was fourteen years old.
The estate was Stan Hywet Hall, the dream house of the early-twentieth-century rubber magnate F. A. Seiberling. Seiberling died in the mid-1950s, having long since lost the bulk of his fortune. As a tax dodge to benefit his offspring, he bequeathed his decaying Xanadu to the city of Akron, providing the town with a splendid site for a new civic cultural center. Noting his history of cultural midwifery, the board of directors of the fledgling center contacted my father. They invited him back to Ohio to become the center’s first executive director. With dreams of a new incarnation of his beloved Shakespeare festival, performed on the back terrace of a Tudor manor house, he jumped at the offer. After a single year on the faculty of The Stockbridge School, he was on the move again. Like a tennis ball thwacked back over the net, the family once again trekked out to Ohio, the old Studebaker groaning under the weight of our worldly possessions.
One evening, back at The Stockbridge School, my parents had sat me down in the living room of the icehouse and revealed to me their latest plans. This time I remember my response. I burst into tears, stormed out of the house, and ran off into the night. Alone in the middle of a field, surrounded by the Berkshire Hills and lit up by moonlight, I cried out at the top of my lungs, “WHY ME?! WHY AKRON?!” Looking back, I have to admit that this was all a bit theatrical. There was nobody watching, but I was acting my head off. Perhaps this was only fitting. In my next two years in Akron, events would begin to propel me, without my even knowing it, toward a career in the theater.
Over the course of those two years, I was a ninth-grader at Simon Perkins Junior High School and a tenth-grader at John R. Buchtel High (without ever learning who those two estimable Akronites actually were). These were my first big-city schools. With the onset of classes, I was confronted by throngs of students, multiple classrooms, thousands of lockers lining the halls, crowded assemblies, and clamorous pep rallies. I’d never seen anything like it. But this time the newness of the experience proved more exciting than overwhelming. And this time my skin was a little tougher. In an atmosphere of such energy and happy chaos, being a new student was far less of a trial than it had been in our preceding moves. Besides, I was welcomed into my new community in a surprising way. In those days, the curriculum of the Akron public schools was amazingly sophisticated. It accommodated and encouraged my most abiding, passionate interest. For two years, I was given the extraordinary luxury of starting every single school day with two elective periods of art.
And such wonderful classes! Every morning I would eagerly anticipate those early hours of school. Without fail, art class would launch me into the rest of my day with a heady creative rush. I did drawings in charcoal and ink, paintings with watercolors and acrylics, woodcuts, linoleum prints, silk screens, ceramics and mosaics. In those two years, my two teachers were twinkly older women, determined to unleash the creative juices of every one of their students. The second of them was named Fran Robinson. “Miss Robinson” was one of the best teachers I ever had. A distinguished craftswoman in her own right, she had invented her own highly individual medium. Using her Singer sewing machine, she embroidered fanciful tapestries in brightly colored thread. Occasionally her work would appear in the pages of Art News, and we would all feel the frisson of our teacher’s fame. Pricked on by her encouragement and inspired by her ingenuity and flair, I grew more determined than ever to pursue the visual arts.
After only one year, my older sister Robin had left The Stockbridge School and had joined the family on our return trip to Ohio. So once again she and I were two grades apart in the same school system. I loved having her back in the household. She had absorbed the urbane tastes and left-wing politics of her Stockbridge schoolmates, and she now set out to find like-minded friends in her new Akron crowd. She found them all right. There were about five of them, all smart, vital young women. But the tone of Buchtel High School was fiercely conservative (its affluent students were known around town as “The Cake Eaters”), so Robin’s new set of girlfriends was a tiny, heretical cabal. They reveled in their rebel status. They went to subtitled European films at Akron’s lone art house; they attended concerts of Glenn Gould and Andrés Segovia at the cavernous Akron Armory; they collected the records of Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Theodore Bikel; they met early on Friday mornings before school to listen to entire Italian operas, following along in the scores. They even consorted with gaunt, long-haired college boys who drove them to nighttime meetings of the Young People’s Socialist League.
I watched all of this hard-core beatnik activity with a mixture of curiosity, timidity, and longing. In the school classrooms, athletic fields, cafeteria, and gym, I had quickly formed my own circle of Akron mates, stolid crew-cut white boys with whom I shared the reliable common language of pro sports and dirty jokes. But my attentions were divided. Just as I had in Stockbridge, I found myself conducting a two-tiered social life. I liked my gang just fine, but I was crazy about my sister and her older, hipper friends. Outside of school, I cultivated their bohemian tastes, tagged along on their esoteric outings, and clung to them like a burr.
From day one in Akron, my artwork was my highest priority. My natural facility made me the top student artist in my class. My paintings, drawings, and prints hung in the school hallways and won “Gold Keys” in citywide scholastic art competitions. In the midst of such feverish artistic activity, I never imagined for a moment that I would end up an actor. But in a couple of instances, the catnip of theatrical performance began to assert itself for the first time since those early years in Yellow Springs.
In the middle of ninth grade, I initiated a school project as far-fetched as it was ambitious. I set out to produce and stage a fifteen-minute piece of theater, unconnected to schoolwork and unsupervised by any teacher. The piece was the “gulling scene” from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. This is the scene in which the loathsome, puritanical Malvolio is tricked by four other gleefully vengeful characters in the play. I took the plum role of Malvolio and recruited schoolmates to play Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Fabian, and Maria. I gave everyone a little rudimentary direction and designed a simple set, consisting of a “boxtree,” which I fashioned out of painted masonite and lime-green crepe paper. After a few weeks of after-school rehearsal, we presented the results at a school assembly. The audience of ninth-graders were attentive, if slightly bewildered. There were no gales of laughter, and at the end they applauded with a kind of grave, respectful admiration. But the tepid reception didn’t bother me. For me, the show was fifteen minutes of undiluted triumph.
I remember almost none of the circumstances surrounding this bizarre event. Looking back, the whole thing completely astonishes me. How did it ever happen? When did I come up with such an idea? Shakespeare, performed by and for ninth-graders? Whatever possessed me? Was I crazy? Who did I think I was? Why, my father, of course. In hindsight, it seems quite clear that I was unconsciously aping him and his audacious schemes. Just like him, I was hurling Shakespeare at an unlikely, unpromising audience, and somehow making a success of it.
In tenth grade, the following year, I dusted off Twelfth Night once again. I reprised the entire gulling scene, this time playing all five parts. I performed it as a monologue in the category of “Humorous Declamation,” for Buchtel High’s National Forensic League team. On Saturdays, I would travel with a busload of brainy debaters to tournaments held in empty high schools all over north-central Ohio. The others would debate and I would perform, competing with teams from all over the region. I never did as well in my category as the debaters did in theirs. Twelfth Night, after all, was pretty heady stuff for a tenth-grader. In competition, I scored far fewer laughs than the students who recited the comic prose of Mark Twain and Robert Benchley, and I never won a thing. But watching my rivals in all those echoing auditoriums, I began to sense the beginnings of a smug certainty: I was the best actor in the house.
But it was during my Akron summers that theater began to truly take hold of me. This was when my father produced the Akron Shakespeare Festival. This festival was only to last two summers, but in both of those summers, I immersed myself in the pungent world of yet another of Arthur Lithgow’s theatrical ventures.
For reasons that will shortly be revealed, the two seasons of the Akron Shakespeare Festival were presented in two completely different settings. The first was the terrace of Stan Hywet Hall, with the rear façade of the Tudor manor house providing a backdrop. For the festival’s inaugural season, my father chose a repertory of four plays that echoed the start of his triumphant Antioch run. These were the first four history plays from Shakespeare’s retelling of the War of the Roses—Richard II; Henry IV, parts 1 and 2; and Henry V. In keeping with his trademark style, the plays were staged simply, on a symmetrical arrangement of bare platforms, and performed by a small troupe of accomplished young actors imported from New York. But though the productions were straightforward and unadorned, the setting made them glorious. It is hard to imagine a more appropriate and more beautiful spot in America for this most English of historical pageants. The leaded-glass windows glinted behind Falstaff in his scenes inside the Boar’s Head Tavern; Richard II cried out in defeat, “Down, down I come!” from a crenellated parapet high above the audience; and when Henry V declaimed “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!” the looming, starlit manor house stood in for Harfleur Castle.
Initially, I just hung around rehearsals, much as I had done years before during those happy summers in Yellow Springs. But by now I was a gangly fourteen-year-old. I had arrived at the age when, to the forgiving eyes of an audience, I could pass for an adult. By the time the company began rehearsing the two parts of Henry IV, the play’s big battle scenes forced the director, Edward Payson Call, to look for spear carriers anywhere he could find them. Inevitably, I was conscripted, and soon I was rehearsing five or six scenes in each of the last three plays. My first assignment was the only part I was remotely right for: I was one of Falstaff’s wretched platoon of army recruits, old men and young boys whom Falstaff dismisses as “food for powder.” I had a comic crossover with four other raggd peasants. For a weapon, I carried a rake.
But the summer wore on and I was quickly promoted through the ranks. The fight choreography grew more elaborate. I became more confident and histrionic. I dashed around with pennants and banners, swords and pikes. I yelled battle cries in English and French. I stoutly fought for the Yorks and the Lancasters, for the English and the French, killing and being killed with near-operatic flourish.
And when Henry V rolled around, something wonderful happened. In a reprise of my “Mustardseed” moment from seven years before, I was given an actual role. I was cast as “A French Messenger.” It was the smallest speaking role in the play, but a speaking role nonetheless. I had a single line. It was my job to walk into the French king’s court and announce the arrival of Exeter, an envoy from England. For a week, I dutifully rehearsed with the full company. I ran my single line about a thousand times. On the night of the first performance, I waited nervously in the wings, dressed in black tights and a belted white tabard with blue fleurs-de-lys stenciled all over it. Nearby, pacing restlessly in the dark, was Exeter himself. He was played by the young David Carradine (yes, that David Carradine, from Kung Fu). As my cue arrived, I bolted up six stairs onto the stage-left platform and yelled as loud as I could in a piping, barely audible voice:
“Ambassadors from Harry, King of England, do crave admittance to your majesty!”
It was my first line spoken onstage as a grown-up actor.
Although I regarded this as another stunning success, I knew very well that I was on the lowliest rung of the company hierarchy. At the topmost rung was our acknowledged leading player. This was a splendid actor named Donald Moffat. His roles in the four plays included Richard II, the Chorus in Henry V, and a poignant and hilarious Justice Shallow in Henry IV, part 2. Donald was a thirty-year-old Englishman from the West Country, trained at RADA, and transplanted to New York with an actress wife, a gamine four-year-old daughter, and a baby boy. In the years following that summer, he grew to be a major actor in New York theater and a familiar face on screen (he played LBJ in the film of The Right Stuff). Nowadays he has slipped gracefully into retirement, embracing an old actor’s obscurity with dignity and contentment.
In those days, Donald was a striking young man, a British edition of the young Max von Sydow. He had a rangy frame, a long face, penetrating eyes, and a soft voice. In a company of actors who relied on high energy and bluff athleticism, he was the quiet center of the storm, commanding the stage with poetic simplicity. He was quick-witted and intelligent, a man of uncompromising taste, with a warm smile and a stealthy sense of humor. Best of all, he was reflexively curious about all sorts of people and things outside the insular world of theater. From the moment we met, he took a bemused interest in me, especially in my precocious commitment to art. Such an interest was enormously flattering to a fourteen-year-old. I instantly put him on a pedestal and secretly made him my mentor. In the next few years, theater gradually seduced me away from art. I suspect this would never have happened if my father had never hired Donald Moffat.
For all its glories, the Shakespeare Festival’s tenure at Stan Hywet was a flash in the pan. Following a familiar pattern, my father found himself on unsteady ground as the executive director of Stan Hywet Hall. After the close of the festival season, he soon learned that not everybody was pleased with its success. It became clear that half the members of the board of directors had vastly different priorities for Stan Hywet than my father did. These men and women were pillars of wealthy Akron society. They did not see Stan Hywet as a center for arts and culture. In their eyes it was a historic landmark, a museum, a garden center, a symbol of Akron’s lost splendors, and a shrine to F. A. Seiberling. An outdoor Shakespeare festival, no matter how successful, had no place in their grand design. Massive lighting towers on the back terrace? Wooden risers and hundreds of folding chairs atop the reflecting pool? Sweaty, scrofulous young men in nothing but shorts and sandals, rehearsing noisy outdoor battle scenes or dashing through tapestried halls as they rushed to make an entrance? Cast parties on opening nights, with the campy squeals of happy, drunken New York actors, floating through the summer air? This would not do.
But my father pressed on. Either through defiance or denial, he began planning for a second summer of Shakespeare, giving only a nod to the everyday business of Stan Hywet Hall. Manned by its legions of volunteer ladies, Stan Hywet hummed along on autopilot. There were flower shows, salon concerts, a Christmas pageant, and a Festival of Tudor Sports. But Dad showed only a halfhearted interest. His passions lay elsewhere. He was intent on expanding the scope of his festival. Unbeknownst to him (or perhaps not), a quiet conspiracy was under way to prevent him from ever doing so.
And so it was that on a Sunday in April the following spring, Stan Hywet’s board of directors met to decide whether to cancel the second season of the festival and, more ominously, whether to remove my father from his position. Once again, our fate hung in the balance. I was fifteen now, but apparently just as thick-headed as ever: like all those other times, my father’s professional jeopardy took me completely by surprise. Adding to the drama of the moment was the fact that the fateful board meeting was held in a large common room in the carriage house, just beneath our living room floor. The whole family, including my father, sat around waiting while our future was being hotly debated down below. Dad had his ardent supporters, of course, so passions ran high on both sides. We could hear shouting under the floorboards. But a strange gallows humor prevailed, and all of us were manically upbeat. All of us, that is, except my five-year-old sister, Sarah Jane, who sat in a corner by herself, in uncharacteristic silence.
My folks had a peppy, exuberant friend on the board, a lawyer named Ralph Felver. Ralph was a forceful advocate of my father’s cause. Several times during the meeting, he sprinted upstairs to give us reports from the front. Late in the afternoon he burst in and shouted, “They killed the festival! Now they’re goin’ after the kid!” He turned and ran back downstairs, in a last-ditch attempt to save my father’s job. At that point, Sarah Jane stood, walked over to my father and asked in a quavering voice, “Daddy, what kid does he mean?”
Dad was fired that day. Our days at Stan Hywet Hall were numbered. And I was left with an abiding, lifelong suspicion of small-bore civic boosters, genteel pseudo-aristocrats, conniving garden club mavens, and Ohio Republicans. For a few more months, Dad stayed on at Stan Hywet as a lame duck, but I can’t imagine that he gave the place much attention. Apart from his understandable bitterness, he had something far more pressing on his mind. In an eerie echo of the Toledo episode, he had passed the point of no return in planning the upcoming summer festival. Once again, actors had been hired, contracts had been signed, and obligations had to be met. He had to put on another season of the Akron Shakespeare Festival. He was legally bound. And anyway, what the hell else was he going to do? The question was where.