Maybe some ticket buyers to John Lithgow: Stories by Heart have long dreamed of Lithgow fixing them cocoa, tucking them in, and regaling them with a bedtime tale. Those people have probably not seen Raising Cain.
One of the finest things about Lithgow is how unclassifiable he is, how idiosyncratic. Another pale giant with a rabbit face and a plum pudding voice might have become a niche performer, but he has always moved gracefully among classics and schlock, leads and character roles, charmers and drips and villains and extraterrestrials. So it is both a pleasure and a disappointment to find him doing something as aggressively ordinary as this one-man show, which Lithgow first developed a decade ago, alternating family reminiscences with good-natured performances of two short stories, Ring Lardner’s Haircut and PG Wodehouse’s Uncle Fred Flits By.
Lithgow, dressed in a loose gray suit, steps on to a stage decorated to look like a wood-paneled study. Friendly and avuncular, he bathes for a while in the audience acclaim and then offers a series of rhetorical questions about the matter at hand. “Why do all of us want to hear stories?” he asks. “Why do some of us want to tell them? Why, for that matter, are all of you even here tonight?” That last question is actually a pretty good one and raises others: why would a leading non-profit like the Roundabout devote a Broadway theater to something so humdrum? Were no new plays available? Is a cracking turn on The Crown so bankable? Has no one there seen Dexter?
Then Lithgow introduces a book central to his childhood, Tellers of Tales, a collection of 100 short stories selected by W Somerset Maugham. When Lithgow was young, his father, Arthur Lithgow, an intermittently successful actor, director and producer, would read his children a story from it at bedtime. Now Lithgow does the same, though after a page or two he abandons the book itself and begins to act out the stories.
The first, set in a rural Michigan town, is an American gothic, the second, which begins at the bread roll-battered Drones Club, is an English trifle, with an unnecessary intermission in between. Lithgow performs both ably, switching voices, postures and outsized facial expressions with ease. But that’s really the bare minimum for a successful single-actor, multi-character show. When you set yourself a low bar, it’s easy enough to step over. There is one startling moment when Lithgow looks likely to remove his trousers, but he’s only tucking in his shirttail.
Stories by Heart is cozy and folksy, as affable and daring as a dish of vanilla ice cream. When performing Uncle Fred Flits By, Lithgow speaks of a character who has generated “a great store of loopiness which expends itself with frightful violence”. That could describe plenty of Lithgow’s performances. Not this one. The man has been de-looped.
