Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Dave Davies. Today, John Lithgow, veteran of hundreds of performances on stage, screen, and television. To play Winston Churchill in the series The Crown, he had an idea to help him nail the statesman's gravelly voice.
He spooned pieces of apple with a melon baller and stuck them in the back of his cheeks for his first reading with the cast. And stuck them in the back and spoke.
And it was sensational, but my mouth immediately filled up with apple cider.
Lithgow is currently starring in the play Giant on Broadway. He plays the renowned children's author Roald Dahl, caught in a public controversy after he wrote an article laced with anti-Semitic statements. Also, we'll talk about Stephen Sondheim's life in music with Daniel Okrent, author of a new book, Stephen Sondheim, Art Isn't Easy. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.
This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Dave Davies. Our first guest today, John Lithgow, is an actor you can probably recall from a half dozen rolls off the top of your head. But the remarkable thing about his nearly 200 performances on stage, screen, and television is that at age 80, he's still going strong.
You can see him playing an intelligence agent with Jeff Bridges in the FX action series The Old Man. He plays the character Dumbledore in a new HBO Harry Potter series that premieres in December. And he's starring now on Broadway, doing eight performances a week in the play Giant, about a troubling side to renowned children's author Roald Dahl.
Among Lithgow's many career honors are Oscar nominations for his roles in the film The World According to Garp and Terms of Endearment, and six Primetime Emmy Awards for playing Winston Churchill in The Crown, a serial killer in the series Dexter, and an alien visiting Earth in the sitcom Third Rock from the Sun.
He's been nominated for six Tony Awards and won twice, including once for his very first appearance on Broadway. Lithgow has also written several children's books, a memoir titled Drama, an Actor's Education, and the Dumpty Trilogy, three books of satirical poems inspired by the current occupant of the White House.
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Chapter 2: Who is John Lithgow and what is his current role?
John Lithgow, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you, Dave. I feel welcome.
You're playing Dahl who is kind of – it's oversimplistic to call him a villain here. But he's a very problematic character. Did you feel empathy for him and how did you connect with him?
Well, you look for ways you can empathize with every character. And if you're playing a scoundrel of any stripe, you just try to make it interesting. You try to figure out what made him that way. And Dahl is a man so famous for one thing and not known at all for this other thing, his kind of overbearing and sometimes cruel nature. I just found it fascinating, the different perceptions of him.
And curiously, I have a good friend, the actress Maria Tucci, who is the widow of the editor Robert Gottlieb, who is the man who fired Roald Dahl from Alfred Knopf because he was just so insufferable and cruel to everybody he worked with there. And I knew this about him before this even came up. This, to me, was fascinating.
Anyone who is that successful, that much of an asset for a publisher to be fired because he was impossible to work with. I just thought, well, there's something there.
Why don't you just tell us a bit about the action in this play? It's you as Roald Dahl and your fiancée and two representatives from your publishers. Give us a sense of what the issue is and what happens.
Yes, it's set in 1983, but it's about the events of 1982 when Israel was in deep conflict with Lebanon, mainly because they were trying to purge the PLO from Beirut. And they invaded Beirut brutally and brutally. Dahl wrote a book review a year later of a book about that invasion, which very much took the Palestinians side. And in that review, he betrayed his own anti-Semitism.
between the lines and in a few of the lines quite explicitly. And it caused a minor controversy then, which over the years grew into a bigger and bigger controversy about Roald Dahl because that was the time when he basically admitted to being very anti-Semitic.
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Chapter 3: What controversy surrounds Roald Dahl in the play 'Giant'?
But the lines can get fuzzy and assumptions can be made that anti-Semitism is at the heart of anybody criticizing Israel. And I think part of the brilliance of this play is that in the first act, when we don't learn Dahl's exact words from the article he wrote or other comments that would be made public later, we're kind of invited to explore our own feelings about this and think,
Maybe Roald Dahl is just making a point about the conduct of war and not about the Jewish people.
Yeah, it sort of throws an audience off balance no matter what their political leanings and feelings are. You know, you back away from the phrase villain, and I appreciate that. We don't want him just to be the villain of the piece, but he's a dark character or he's a character with a very dark side.
But the play becomes this ferocious debate between him and this young American Jewish woman from a New York publishing house. And that debate is extremely articulate. It's very passionate on both sides. In the case of... Dahl's side of the argument, the argument is polluted by anti-Semitism. But he's right on occasion. He's like a broken clock.
And the audience, I mean, up on the stage, you can almost hear their anxiety trying to grapple this.
Right. And the debate gets increasingly personal. And in the end, Dahl says some things which – I mean I was at one performance and there was one comment. I'm sure it's the one you know that the audience audibly gasped. It was something he said to a reporter, right?
Mm-hmm. I deliberately don't quote it in interviews because it has such power in performance. But it is something he literally said. It's an unspeakable turn of phrase. And it's like... It is the moment at which people see the very darkest side of Dahl. And they see it very clearly. And it's right near the end of the play. So, in a sense... The whole play has been building to that moment.
My challenge in playing the role is to spend the whole play motivating that moment, almost explaining that moment, explaining it emotionally as much as politically.
Right. And he did have a hard life in a lot of ways, right?
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Chapter 4: How does John Lithgow connect with the character Roald Dahl?
Placed little balls of some material in the jowls of your cheeks to give you that – that thing going?
Yes, yes. I experimented with that when I was still in America before I went over there. I used a melon baller to create these little balls of apple and I put them in the back of my cheeks. Churchill had this unique lisp that was generated by the back of his tongue. And it worked wonderfully.
I even took my melon baller and an apple to one of the first rehearsals, which was nothing but sitting around the table and talking. But I proposed this idea in front of everybody. I carved out two little apple balls and stuck them in the back and spoke and spoke some of my lines, and I believe I read one of the scenes.
And it was sensational, but my mouth immediately filled up with apple cider, you know. I mean, and I was spitting all over the table. Well, we hired this great toothmeister, a man named Christopher Lyons, who does all the great false teeth for Tilda Swinton and Meryl Streep as Maggie Thatcher. Well, he made these little silicon plumpers, we called them, that clicked onto my back teeth.
It changed everything. I mean, it made me sound like Chester because he did have this—he sounded like he had marbles in the back of his mouth. But it also just made me feel so different from myself. I mean, I've worked with the RSC, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and at the National, and I've done about 10 roles of Englishman in England. And I'm better at it.
I must say, listening to myself as Churchill, I still had a lot to learn.
Really? You're better at an English accent now than you were when you played Churchill?
Oh, I think so. I'm doing Dumbledore and Harry Potter with a marvelous dialect coach watching me like a hawk. And she doesn't give me many notes anymore, but she certainly did the first few months.
Yeah, this is for the HBO series based on Harry Potter. Have you finished shooting the first series?
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of the play's setting in 1983?
She was his closest friend, and she often would do this. He would play them for her before anybody else. So she came over. He had told her before that that it was a horror show. It was going to be a spined And so she comes over to his house and he plays a few of the first songs and she stops him two songs into it and says, this isn't, you know, fun with horror. This is the story of your life.
And as Sondheim reported it, he said, it never occurred to me, but of course it is. But I was able to determine through a couple of sources that but primarily Judy Prince, who never gave interviews, that in fact it was about revenge.
And you write that his psychiatrist, Milton Horowitz, wrote papers on revenge and on revenge and masochism. And Horowitz connects revenge to deep loneliness and the need to connect, which you can also relate to Sondheim.
Yeah, there are two major arcs to his life. One is from absolute alienation to finally near the end of his life connection. The other is from an ambivalence that could be crippling at times to resolution, to knowing who he was and what he was capable of doing. But it took 50 years for him to move from one of those poles to the next one.
So in terms of Sweeney being about revenge and people thinking it's autobiographical in some way, not the murder part, but just about revenge, Sondheim said the difference between Sweeney and me is that I turned it into art.
I think that's a sentence that says a great deal about his entire career and his entire life, that through his music and his lyrics, he was able to express things that he could not, for various forms of inhibition, express otherwise. It was where, if it's not autobiographical, obviously he's not slitting throats. Obviously, you know, he's not
Georges Seurat, obviously he's not in the woods and into the woods, but the feelings expressed in those shows all come from inside of him, I think, very, very clearly.
And I think it's in a smaller way inside all of us that we get angry, that we want to get back at someone, and we don't necessarily act on it. But it's just I love that show so much. And there's a part of me, you know, I'm fairly inhibited myself, but there's a part of me that like I suppress certain feelings. And you just like relate to all the feelings in that show.
Absolutely. And it's the inhibitions that keep us from expressing those feelings.
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Chapter 6: How does the play address anti-Semitism and public perception?
even though Hammerstein was at that point the most prominent and successful lyricist on Broadway. But as a nurturing personality, he valued him immensely. And part of the nurturing that Oscar brought to the relationship was to be frank with him so that when the young Steve is trying to write music or write a play, Oscar would be very direct with him. He said, sorry, this is no good.
You're trying to pretend you're somebody other than you are. Write what you know. Write what you think. And those were the lessons that Sondheim cherished for the rest of his life.
And one of the first things Sondheim showed Hammerstein when Sondheim was still pretty young, Hammerstein's response to it was, this is really terrible. I'm not saying you're not talented, you are, but this is terrible.
Right. And Sondheim's glad for that. The same thing shows up when he's at college at Williams, when he's studying music with the composer Milton Babbitt. He wants the criticism. He relishes the criticism. But that happened only in the intimacy of personal or professional relationships. Criticism from the outside
Most creative people, certainly most creative people in the theater that I know, are very wary of, leery of, and displeased by critics, but not to the degree that Stephen Sondheim was. He despised critics.
So I'm getting back to talking about Sondheim's life. He knew he was gay, but you couldn't really come out then, not even on Broadway, where like so many of the directors and writers and composers and lyricists were gay, and the audience as well, but you couldn't be out because that's how it was.
So it seems to me from your book that he really tried to be straight because you just couldn't be out then.
I think he gave it a shot. I think it wasn't that he made a valiant effort to do it. But let's see if this is a possibility. And he did not come out publicly, really, for the middles to late 70s. Not that anybody was asking that much in those days. Certainly all the people who knew him, they knew he was gay. He knew he was gay. He did not think it was a defining aspect of his life.
He didn't want to be, as it were, typecasted. He wasn't a gay composer. He was a composer. And his private life was something completely separate.
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