Review John Lithgow Stories by Heart on Broadway
Review: Surprise Lessons From John Lithgow'southward 'Stories by Heart'
- John Lithgow: Stories by Heart
- NYT Critic's Choice
- Broadway, Play , Solo Operation
- 2 hrs.
- Closing Date:
- American Airlines Theater, 227 Due west. 42nd St.
- 212-719-1300
"Check, cheque," goes the razor. "Scha, scha, scha," goes the strop.
But there is no razor; at that place is no hone.
The just affair making noise onstage during John Lithgow'southward "Stories by Centre," which opened Thursday evening at the American Airlines Theater, is Mr. Lithgow himself. Reciting Ring Lardner's 1925 short story "Haircut," set in a small-town barbershop in the Midwest, he brings an anthropologist's specificity (and a Foley creative person's ingenuity) to every swoop of the frock and slap of the pomade that accompanies the main character'south monologue.
So, to begin with, give Mr. Lithgow a audio effects award.
Then give him one for spiritual effects, because "Stories by Heart" is delightful: illuminating the stories, uplifting us.
I accept to admit I didn't expect to relish such an old-fashioned testify; please, illumination and uplift feel like debased currencies in 2018, purchasing naught. Furthermore, I knew that Mr. Lithgow had been performing "Stories by Heart" for 10 years. A comedy version was commencement staged in 2008 at Lincoln Center Theater; since and so he has brought it to some 35 cities while "leading the life of a time-warp vaudevillian."
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That was only what worried me: the possibility of past-its-prime ham. (Mr. Lithgow has never been uncomfortable with the grand style.) "Stories by Heart" seemed to be the kind of quick and cheap testify that a theater visitor, in this instance the Roundabout, mounts when at that place's a hole in its schedule or budget. (The production, directed by Daniel Sullivan, is luxurious but in Kenneth Posner'due south lighting.) Besides, who needs the equivalent of a bedtime fairy tale on Broadway when you tin have your phone read y'all "Moby-Dick" on the subway?
Though aureate plenty for whatsoever nostalgist, "Stories past Heart" is neither soporific nor cute. For starters, the two stories that Mr. Lithgow recites — "Haircut" in the get-go human activity and P. 1000. Wodehouse'south "Uncle Fred Flits Past" in the second — are superb, outlandish and, in very unlike ways, hair-raising.
You wouldn't guess that from the opening of "Haircut," in which a professionally logorrheic barber entertains a new customer with tales of life in his two-fleck boondocks. There'southward this practical joker, you lot see, and this gal who won't requite him the time of mean solar day and this doctor she likes and then on. But the story soon asserts itself, or rather insinuates itself, as a scathing indictment of skillful-old-boy-ism: the barely civilized tradition of men playing tricks on one another and arranging nasty traps (including marriage) for women.
That'southward all in the Lardner, merely Mr. Lithgow adds another emotional channel past showing us how the hairdresser, himself a skilful old boy, is implicated in the nastiness he pretends just to describe. An astonishing collection of laughs — whinnies, giggles, squeals, snorts, heaves — gradually colors the narrative, until this seemingly harmless human becomes, in upshot, not just a witness to savagery, but too an accompaniment.
The seemingly harmless homo I mean is the i in Lardner's story, simply the aforementioned thought applies to the quite real man who plays him. The ease with which Mr. Lithgow inhabits the character, merely untucking his shirt to propose a barber's smock, hints at the style all effective storytellers are complicit in their stories.
So there is a touch of pathos in learning, from Mr. Lithgow's personal patter, that he get-go got to know "Haircut" when his father read information technology to him and his siblings during their peripatetic childhood. Arthur Lithgow, himself a man of the theater, with a "plummy vocalization and husky smell," spent his life education and acting and opening Shakespeare festivals around the Midwest, moving oft to stay one step ahead of ruination.
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With however much love the younger Lithgow daubs the memory — and "Stories by Centre" is in essence a son's tribute — he cannot quite overpaint the other colors of that exciting life, but as the hairdresser cannot assist revealing more than he intends.
And then in the 2d act, every bit the fiction gets lighter, the memoir gets darker. We at present learn more near Arthur Lithgow at the end of his life, when low almost completed the job affliction had started. Seeking to enhance Arthur's spirits as he hovered on the threshold of his last illness (he died in 2004), John Lithgow started reading aloud to his male parent the same stories his father had in one case read aloud to him.
The one that turned the key to the elder Lithgow's mood was the Wodehouse, and if it doesn't plow the key to yours, you are not susceptible to British literary humor. Like all of Wodehouse's best tales, "Uncle Fred Flits By" is utter nonsense, a tightly plotted farce made of thin air.
In this i, the starting time of a series published from 1935 to 1961, readers are introduced to a nervous Londoner named Pongo Twistleton, whose orderly life is disarrayed by the visit of his peremptory and mischievous uncle Fred from the country. A 24-hour interval trip to Fred's ancestral home — at present a suburban development of semidetached houses — leads to all kinds of impostures and adventures involving an unhappy young woman, her disapproving parents, her "pinkish" fiancé and a conspiratorial parrot.
Wodehouse isn't equally easy to read aloud as Lardner, only Mr. Lithgow takes a great bargain of pleasure in mapping sentences whose verbs are barely in earshot of their subjects. And he revels in Dadaist assemblages like this one: "I know if someone came to me and said 'Jelly this eel!' I should be nonplused." Withal the Wodehouse, for all its airy wit, is not about nothing: It too is a story of deception, only in this case the kind that delivers delicious comeuppance to the puffed-up and slow-witted.
And what could feel more than current, more than worthwhile, in the first cold days of 2018 than that? The imagination, Mr. Lithgow wants us to know, is a powerful weapon if we don't let it go tiresome.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/theater/review-john-lithgow-stories-by-heart-broadway.html
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