Lithgow takes stage for Audible’s theater series
Shhhhh. John Lithgow is performing his solo show, “Stories by Heart.” The five audience members are riveted. Don’t speak, don’t fidget and, for God’s sake, don’t look at your phone. The actor appreciates your attention. He needs it. He is accustomed to performing this show for hundreds of people after a recently wrapped Broadway run.
The small Burbank recording studio he finds himself in is quite different. On this particular afternoon, he’s acting for the audiobook and podcast company Audible, which has recently made calculated strides into the theater space by recording one-person productions.
Tall, with posture that makes him appear even taller, Lithgow cuts a familiar and somewhat formidable form sitting on a swivel chair in front of a wooden lectern with an open book — and a large microphone — in front of him.
He’s performing two stories that his late father delighted him with as a young boy: Ring Lardner’s 1925 short story “Haircut” and P.G. Wodehouse’s “Uncle Fred Flits By.” He falls into character with ease, assuming the voices of up to five characters. His hand feigns a slight palsy while he intones the lines of an elderly man, and if the actor stumbles, he pauses, swallows and begins again as an Audible minder in the recording booth makes a slender pencil stroke in the script.
The reach of Lithgow’s critically acclaimed show had been limited to the 740 seats of the American Airlines Theatre. The recent Audible release, however, instantaneously expanded the potential audience into the millions.
Or as Audible founder and Chief Executive Don Katz says, “In a matter of seconds, more people can be listening to an Audible original than can pack a 1,000-seat theater eight times per week for half a century.”
That doesn’t mean Katz is disdainful of the live theater experience. To the contrary. As part of what Audible calls a commitment to expanding the reach, scope and impact of theater, the company has claimed the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York’s Greenwich Village as its creative home for live performances. It has also been commissioning established and emerging playwrights to write oneand two-person shows to be performed as Audible Originals.
Participants in Audible’s theater lineup say Minetta Lane is the linchpin in a program that aims to forge a wholly modern frontier for theater, pairing an age-old art form with technology in a way that not only democratizes access but also encourages artists to approach theater in new ways.
Playwright and actor David Cale’s one-man show “Harry Clarke,” starring Billy Crudup, was the first play to stage a limited run at Minetta Lane before it was recorded for digital distribution. Cale recalls a thrilling cross-pollination of forms that benefited the live show and its digital counterpart.
“Harry Clarke” not only enjoyed four weeks of rehearsal but also ran for eight weeks at Minetta Lane before Crudup went to the studio to record it with director Leigh Silverman and the production’s sound designer, Bart Fasbender. By then, Crudup was in fantastic shape for the recording.
“It was a dreamboat of an experience,” Cale said. “You just cannot get that level of detail and performance without having done a run. It was fully realized, and there was no compromise.”
The closest comparison to what Audible is doing with theater in 2018 would be radio in the 1930s and ’40s. More recent correlations can be made with the late Joe Frank’s series on KCRW as well as with public radio programs like “This American Life” and “The Moth Radio Hour,” though those focus more on nonfiction storytelling.
Regardless, what’s old is suddenly new again, as is often true with modern technology. In this case, that technology is the smartphone, which enables listeners to put theater in their pockets while they’re driving cars, climbing mountains, biking, at the beach or lying by the pool.
Theater, as anyone who has ever sat rapt before a staging of “Hamlet” or “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” can tell you, is as much about watching as it is listening. But if you close your eyes, it can come alive in your mind, Lithgow said.
When the actor stands in the recording booth at Out Loud Studios, a cup of peppermint tea beside him along with a bottle of water, some tissues and throat lozenges, he meticulously acts out every portion of his show, just as he did on Broadway.
“I recorded it doing everything, just to remind myself what the next line was,” he said. “And I did all of the sound effects I did onstage as a way of creating the story in the imagination of the audience. So the whole thing has been a great experiment.”
The closest comparison to what Audible is doing with theater in 2018 would be radio in the 1930s and ’40s.