There are actors whom audiences admire for their consistent good work, and that suffices. Then there are actors whom audiences admire for their good work but also imagine would also be worth knowing, worth having as friends. James Stewart, Tom Hanks, Sally Fields are examples of the latter group.
Another is John Lithgow. He’s someone who, it undeniably seems, would be great fun to have a cup of coffee and talk with. Yes, he can play a heavy when asked, as he does in the recent Dinner With Beatriz, but much more often he’s plays some sort of highly clubbable type. And it’s that about him that infuses John Lithgow: Stories by Heart, at the Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre. It’s his irresistible affability that’s all but palpable throughout the two-act piece.
Unmissably, he instantly wins hearts and minds because he arrives on John Lee Beatty’s simple wood-paneled set to chat about his upbringing in a family where, thanks primarily to his regional impresario father Arthur, story-telling was an invaluable part of his education.
Announcing that he plans to relive two stories he cherishes, he declares as his tall, rangy, smiling self that he’ll also gab about the importance of storytelling in all our lives. He does so without necessarily going so far as to explain that stories since prerecorded time arose because people have always craved explanations for the world’s prodigious unknowns.
Of course, he gets to two stories that his dad read from W. Somerset Maugham’s collection Tellers of Tales. Indeed, he doesn’t just recall the volume. He brings the well thumbed, carefully repaired copy with him, treats it lovingly and twice shows pages from it to a couple sitting in the front row. He charges them with assuring the rest of the audience that what he’s had them view is genuine.
For act one, Lithgow recites—no “recites” is a misnomer. He enacts “Haircut,” Ring Lardner’s 1939 story. In which a small town barber, who has a stranger sitting in his chair, gossips about the regulars who populate his establishment. While miming a shave and a haircut (two bits are never mentioned), he recounts local escapades that are cheery at first but eventually turn darker. (Kenneth Posner’s subtle lighting heightens the effect.)
Lithgow’s movements—he makes sounds to duplicate scissors snipping—are clippingly directed by Daniel Sullivan. (Jack O’Brien was the director in 2008, when the evening premiered.) It only slightly odd that, while the barbershop is supposedly always crowded, Lithgow indicates no other patrons during the stranger’s shearing.
For act two, Lithgow does hilariously by P. G. Wodehouse’s 936 “Uncle Fred Flits By.” In this one, he’s several characters, most notably Uncle Fred, whose appearances are forever an embarrassment to his nephew, Pongo Twistleton. (The bloke’s name is only one of the myriad reasons devoted readers in search of solid amusement must read Wodehouse.)
In this tale, Fred takes Pongo to a far-flung corner of London to see old haunts and somehow takes temporary ownership of a home where the actual residents are out at the moment. While squatting imperiously, Fred helps to change the lives of visitors thinking they’re talking to the real owner.
Lithgow’s masculine charm prevails throughout, but it’s probably a good idea to point out that these stories he—and Maugham, a superb story spinner himself, lest we forget—hail from a quite specific period. They’re rounded up mostly from the 19th- and 20th centuries through perhaps 1935 or 1940.
They are stories that, like Lardner’s “Haircut,” were often required reading in English courses through Lithgow’s childhood and young adulthood but may not be on reading lists nowadays. More’s the pity. Lithgow’s hope has to be that patrons, cheered by these stories will look for more. To that end, Lardner and Wodehouse collections are available in the lobby.
So Lithgow’s choices mark him as a child of that part of the century—nothing to turn anyone’s nose up. Not that anything about the always down-to-earth (or down-to-3rd-rock-from-the-sun) fellow could ever be off-putting.
By the way, Lithgow has also told his own story in Drama: An Actor’s Education. The memoir is a delightful and illuminating way to prolong the pleasure of his company.