Drama by John Lithgow Page B

his artistic peers. And despite Princeton’s prestige, the job was unquestionably a comedown for him. He was strenuously promoting McCarter’s theatrical fare, but he had virtually nothing to do with the productions themselves.
    But if this was an indignity to him, he didn’t show it. Indeed, he was flattered by his association with an Ivy League school, and his reduced responsibilities seemed almost a relief to him after his recent years of prolonged cultural combat. He attacked his new job with good humor, renewed vigor, and zest. His high school assemblies evolved into lively dramatic monologues, firing the imagination of the students and priming them for their first experience in a theater. Back at McCarter, he was on hand to greet the raucous young crowds at every matinee. He even created a New Jersey Festival of High School Performing Arts, inviting the winners of drama competitions from all over the state to perform on the McCarter stage. He accomplished all of this with a seasoned producer’s ingenuity and resourcefulness. For a pittance, he purchased a couple of jalopies to serve as company cars for his cross-country junkets. He nursed them along with loving care, tinkering with their wheezing engines and alternating them for each trip. He even gave them Shakespearean monikers. The bilious green Plymouth was “Glistering Phaeton” and the faded maroon Dodge was “Plumpy Bacchus with Pink Hind.”
    As for me, I was off to yet another new school. By extraordinary good fortune, I was destined to finish off my nomadic secondary school career at Princeton High School. Of the eight public schools I attended in all those years, this one was by far the best. For eleventh and twelfth grade, my last big push en route to college, I grabbed the brass ring. My teachers there included three or four of the best I ever had. There was Henry Drewry, a vibrant, fiercely intelligent African-American young man who made electrifying connections between nineteenth-century U.S. history and our early-1960s world. There was Elizabeth Stecchini, an English teacher who bubbled over with the love of language and fine literature (and who could have been the twin sister of Fran Robinson, back in Akron). And best of the lot, there was the brilliant and hilarious Carmine Prezioso, a wildly flamboyant polyglot with the manic energy of Roberto Benigni, who somehow managed to have me speaking French at the end of my very first year of study.
    At Princeton High, I felt free to reinvent myself. My big sister, Robin, had moved on to Barnard College in New York City, heading straight from Akron to her Emerald City of Oz. I missed her, of course, but I no longer required her proximity, her moral support, or her community of bohemian girlfriends. I was on my own and I liked it. I had already reached my full height of six-foot-four, and I resembled a scrawny young Ichabod Crane, but I had finally begun to feel at home in my gangly body. Having weathered the last four or five moves, I had developed a kind of genius for fitting in, acquiring social skills worthy of a seasoned politician. I made friends instantly, with no terror and no tears. The student body at the school was a mixed bag of professors’ children, blue-collar New Jerseyites, and farm kids, and I managed to connect with all of them.
    One source of my newfound self-possession was harsh experience. By now I was an old hand at being the new kid in town. But there was another source, too, one that I was barely aware of at the time but which now strikes me as perfectly obvious. It was theater. In those difficult years prior to the Princeton move, theater had been my godsend. Time and again, it had delivered me from my shell. The Twelfth Night assembly and the Malvolio monologues, the nights in the lighting booth and the days of rehearsal, my precocious comradeship with adult actors and my flirtations with Lake Erie College girls, the spear-carrying and banner-waving, the French Messenger and