I grew up in the small college town of Yellow Springs, Ohio, a world of woods, cornfields—and Shakespeare. Every summer for six glorious years, Antioch College mounted a Shakespeare festival led by Arthur Lithgow, an Antioch professor and consummate man of the theater. I played kids’ parts in the shows and hung out with the actors and technicians, utterly stagestruck. One of the Lithgow children, John, also caught the bug and has since made a bit of a name for himself as an actor—from The World According to Garp to M. Butterfly to 3rd Rock from the Sun—as well as a children’s entertainer, creating songs and storybooks.
After a peripatetic 50-year career, Arthur Lithgow and his wife Sarah retired to the Valley. On an extended visit here, when his father was ill and depressed following a major surgery, son John discovered on his parents’ bookshelf an anthology of short stories Arthur had read to him and his siblings when they were kids in Ohio. Now, reading them to his father, the younger Lithgow rediscovered the uplifting power of storytelling as a shared narrative journey, and in the humorous selections, the healing power of laughter.
Those stories, Lithgow says, not only revived his dad’s spirits but inspired the creation of Stories by Heart, an intimate solo performance in which he relives those childhood memories with bedtime stories. Lithgow first performed the show at Lincoln Center two years ago. He’s now taken an expanded version on the road, with a stop at Pittsfield’s Colonial Theater next week.
Into his own reminiscences, Lithgow weaves two of the stories from his father’s anthology—a pair of classics by P.G. Wodehouse and Ring Lardner. Besides being among the Lithgow family’s favorite tales, they also share a theme: practical jokes.
The Wodehouse story isn’t one of his famous Jeeves and Wooster yarns, but comes from the even zanier trove of Uncle Fred escapades. These comic adventures are told from the point of view of Pongo Twistleton, the long-suffering nephew of the unpredictable Fifth Earl of Ickenham, an anarchic blueblood who delights in mischievous impersonations.
Lithgow begins reading “Uncle Fred Flits By” from his father’s book, seated in an armchair (one of the few props in this platform performance). As the plot gets going—and things get more and more chaotic—he steps fully into it, taking on, with vocal inflection, facial expression and body English, all nine characters, including a parrot.
“Haircut” is one of Ring Lardner’s masterpieces, and a story that, for Lithgow, recalls the laconic Midwesterners of his boyhood. In it, a small-town barber, while giving a shave and haircut to a newcomer, tells him about the town’s prize jokester, who has recently died. “He was certainly a card,” the barber muses, a man who (like Uncle Fred) delighted in fooling people with devilish tricks. Written—and performed—in Lardner’s trademark ungrammatical vernacular, the story maintains a jaunty tone that belies its increasingly dark undercurrent.
Stories by Heart is both deeply personal and universal. Lithgow’s chameleon performance digs into his most cherished memories to unearth abiding truths about family, remembrance and the joy of laughing together.
Stories by Heart: Oct. 7, Colonial Theatre, 111 South Street, Pittsfield, (413) 997-4444, www.thecolonialtheatre.org.
