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John Lithgow: Stories by Heart

The Healing Power of Storytelling

 

Arthur Lithgow with his children

In Stories By Heart, John Lithgow describes a moment in which his aging and chronically ill father experienced a transformation of body and mind while listening to a story out of a childhood storybook. Wheezing with laughter and flooded with good spirits, “my father came back to life” as he heard the story, Lithgow explains. This newfound “life” seemed to sustain his father for over a year, Lithgow says, providing him strength in his ongoing fight against his illness and depression. The phenomenon Lithgow witnessed, as miraculous as it may seem, is not without precedent or scientific backing. “Bibliotherapy,” the use of literature and storytelling as instruments of healing, is an increasingly common practice, and its therapeutic potential, though not uncontroversial, finds much support in any array of scientific studies and documented anecdotes.

Bibliotherapy has been connected with the alleviation of symptoms in people with a wide variety of illnesses, syndromes, and disabilities throughout recorded history. There are stories of neurological patients speaking for the first time in months after reading poetry; seniors with dementia experiencing an abatement of agitated behavior after hearing poems and stories; and sufferers of rheumatoid arthritis and acute physical pain finding noticeable relief during and after diving into a book. In one study published by the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2011, storytelling was found to help a group of patients control their high blood pressure. In another conducted by the University of Bucharest in 2015, adults with severe intellectual disabilities experienced a strengthening of their communication skills and a decrease in instances of negative behavior after sessions of storytelling and active drama therapy. Some recipients of bibliotherapy have even been known to experience improvements so drastic that they have stopped visiting their doctors and reduced their dosage of medication.

Recent studies are illuminating the psychological and neurological reasons behind the effectiveness of bibliotherapy. Reading itself has been shown to have a trancelike effect on the brain similar to that of meditation, and studies have found that those who read regularly have markedly better sleep, greater self-esteem, lower stress levels, and lower rates of depression than do those who rarely or never read. Reading, then, can induce the same therapeutic effects in the mind as deep relaxation. Stories also have been proven to stimulate the brain’s mirror neurons, which serve as our “centers of empathy.” Reading fiction or nonfiction stories activates the mirror neurons in a similar way to observing or interacting with others in day-to-day life. This strengthens the brain’s empathic connections, resulting in heightened social competence and improved mental health overall. The success of bibliotherapy, then, can very much be attributed to a combination of proven neurological factors.

Production photo by Joan Marcus

Bibliotherapy has been on the rise in recent years, from book clubs aimed specifically at providing a place of healing and community to those who need it, to “reading pharmacies” that match literature to an array of physical and mental conditions, to reference books that recommend novels based on personal behaviors or habits that a reader would like to remedy. Books are by no means a guaranteed “cure” for any ailment or a wholesale substitute for doctors, medicine, or professional therapy, and there are medical professionals who caution against treating bibliotherapy as a magic bullet. But, as John Lithgow attests in Stories By Heart, stories really can serve as agents of healing, and their positive impact on our physical and mental health is not to be discounted.

John Lithgow: Stories By Heart begins opens at the American Airlines Theater on January 11, 2018. For tickets and information, please visit our website.


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Tellers of Tales

 

Tellers of Tales; 100 Short Stories from the United States, England, France, Russia and Germany was compiled by W. Somerset Maugham, a successful English playwright (his play The Constant Wife was produced at Roundabout in 2005) and author, and published in 1939. The first edition of the book, likely the one from which Arthur Lithgow read, was 1,574 pages long and weighed 4.5 pounds. As The New York Times book reviewer put it, the book is “so heavy that if while reading it in bed you fall asleep and drop it, you’ll likely break a rib.”

When Maugham began work on Tellers of Tales, his aim was to show how the short story had developed since the beginning of the 19th century. Writers, Maugham noted, write in whatever medium will pay them, and short stories were in demand in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Before 1850, annuals -- ornate literary yearbooks aimed at young women and sold as gifts each holiday season -- were popular. Annuals were replaced by magazines, which paid top dollar for short stories. In America, the rise of the short story was further driven by lax copyright law: it was cheaper for publishers to pirate the work of foreign novelists rather than pay American writers for original work. American writers thus turned their attention to short stories.

Ultimately, Maugham concluded that while writing styles and subjects had changed, “what was a good story at the beginning of the 19th century is still a good story,” and he abandoned his plan of charting the short story’s development. He instead gathered the 100 short stories he found most “moving, exciting, and amusing” because fiction must, first and foremost, entertain the reader.

Organized in approximate chronological order, Tellers of Tales opens with “The Two Drovers” by Sir Walter Scott. First published in 1827, it tells of two cattle drovers in Scotland in 1795 who get into an argument that ends in murder and an execution.

Tellers of Tales includes the work of 96 different authors from five countries, with most stories coming from England and the United States. Maugham contrasts the well-made short stories of authors like Edgar Allan Poe, whose tale “The Gold-Bug” is included, with those of Anton Chekhov, whose realistic, seemingly plotless stories influenced a generation of writers.

Chekhov’s short story “Mouzhiks,” (The Peasants), a grim, realistic tale set in an impoverished rural community, is included. Maugham breaks with chronology for the Russian stories, placing them all together because to absorb them “one has to shift one’s outlook on life, one’s feelings on all manner of things, on to another plane.”

Tellers of Tales also includes “The Nowaks,” a short story from Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood. “The Nowaks,” like the other stories in that book (including “Sally Bowles,” the inspiration for the musical Cabaret), is a semi-autobiographical account of Isherwood’s life in Berlin as the Nazis rose to power in the early 1930s.

Maugham ends Tellers of Tales with Oklahoma Race Riots by Frances W. Prentice, a true account of the 1921 Tulsa race riots. “It is the death of the short story,” Maugham noted in his introduction, “if it can be beaten at it’s own game by the naked truth.”

 

John Lithgow: Stories By Heart opens at The American Airlines Theatre on January 11, 2018. For tickets and information, please visit our website.


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2017-2018 Season, John Lithgow: Stories by Heart


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From the Artistic Director, John Lithgow: Stories By Heart

 

I could not be more thrilled to bring John Lithgow’s extraordinary solo show to a Broadway stage for the first time ever. Stories By Heart originated about ten years ago as a series of storytelling events that John performed in repertory. Since then, John has toured the show around the country, growing and revising his performance along the way, and he has crafted a theatrical event that is just as hilarious as it is moving. As an original presentation of stories that are over 70 years old, Stories By Heart touches on all parts of Roundabout’s mission to both foster new works and revive timeless texts. I am so honored to have John bring his unique performance to our stage under the direction of beloved Tony Award® winner and frequent Roundabout collaborator Daniel Sullivan.

One of the most versatile performers of his time, John Lithgow brings two distinct short stories, over a dozen characters, and decades of his family history to life in a single night of theatre with nothing more than his own transformative abilities as an actor. In a Broadway house literally surrounded by gigantic movie theatre complexes, multistory billboards, and some of the most technologically involved stage performances the world has ever seen, it is important to remember that a single storyteller, equipped with little more than their own instrument, can be just as formidable a dramatic force as the latest big-budget blockbuster. John’s enactment of stories by Ring Lardner and PG Wodehouse is a reminder of the enduring ability of our earliest storytelling traditions to captivate us with their powerful simplicity, as they have throughout history.

John goes even one step further, though, demonstrating how stories, in captivating us, have the capacity to do so much more than entertain. Chronicling his relationship to the two stories he tells from his first memories of them to the very performance you’ll be watching this week, John explores the ways in which stories have accompanied himself and his family in some of their brightest moments together, as well as helped them through some of their darkest. In capturing our imaginations, stories can be agents of both mental and physical healing in ways we might never have thought possible. As Stories By Heart begins, then, I challenge you to embrace that sense of wonder and awe that you once felt at your childhood storybooks – which, as John so masterfully proves, is never lost to time.

I have wanted to collaborate with John since before I even worked in the theatre industry at all. As chance would have it, at the age of 16, my mother took me to the Opening of a Broadway play her friend had produced called The Changing Room on March 6, 1973. It was my first Broadway Opening, and I would not attend another one for fifteen years. All I remember from that night was that the play starred an extraordinary young actor whom I had never heard of named John Lithgow, and that he went on to win the Tony Award for his performance in the play. In the decades since, the stars never quite aligned to allow John to work on a full production here at Roundabout – until now, over 44 years after I first saw him onstage. Having admired John and his work from afar for such a long time, it brings me so much joy to see him now make our stage his own with this incredible evening of theatre.

I am so excited for you to experience John’s virtuosic solo show and the incredible work that Daniel and our design team have done on it. As always, I am eager to hear your reactions to the production, so please continue to email me at ArtisticOffice@roundabouttheatre.org with your thoughts. I can’t tell you how greatly I value your feedback.

I look forward to seeing you at the theatre!

Sincerely,

Todd Haimes
Artistic Director/CEO


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