DramaAn Actor's Education

A meditation on theater as a way of life, told by someone fully steeped in it

John Lithgow came of age in the theater — literally. His father was an actor who spent much of Lithgow’s youth moving around the eastern U.S. from teaching job to directing job, offending small-town bluenoses with his hardcore theater-lifer’s sensibility and boisterous Shakespeare staging. In Drama, Lithgow’s warm memoir, his celebrated movie career — which took off with 1981′s The World According to Garp (in which he played a transsexual named Roberta Muldoon) — is brushed by at the end. The focus here is on the actor’s life on the boards.

Though much of his childhood took place in Ohio and New Jersey, Lithgow, who grew up wanting to be a fine artist, had his eye on New York early. While in high school, he began taking art lessons in the city on Saturdays under the tutelage of Ethel Katz: “She told me one day that I had a distinct, facile talent but that I had to be watchful…Faking it, of course, is the very essence of acting. Ethel Katz may have been telling me more than that day than either of us realized, and more than I wanted to hear.” He soon switched courses, moving to New York with his wife and soon making his first film, an East Coast Easy Rider knockoff called Dealing: “Any stage actor recruited into films has shared my experience of the first time on a movie set. Nobody tells you anything. Who knew that a two-minute scene could take 10 hours to shoot?” Process is paramount in Drama. As the title intimates, it’s a meditation on theater as a way of life, told by someone fully steeped in it.