Stephen Lang at New York’s City Center where he is starring in Defiance
Nothing Wrong With Wanting to Be Great
By Jerry Tallmer
When we think or talk of Hamlet, we tend to forget that, with it all, the sweet prince was a military man, a conflicted introvert whose best friends, Horatio and Marcellus, were soldiers.
If we think of Stephen Lang as the tough-as-nails U.S. Marines Colonel Morgan Littlefield of Defiance, the rigid Colonel Nathan Jessup of A Few Good Men – not to mention dashing George E. Pickett of the Gettysburg film, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson of Gods and Generals, and no fewer than eight Medal of Honor winners in Lang’s own Beyond Glory solo piece – it is necessary to be aware that this rugged actor has also, as he reminds us, “been in four Hamlets and played it once.”
He stops a split second, then adds: “They” – the “Hamlet” reviewers – “beat up on me. That’s okay. It goes with the territory.”
Nobody beat up on Stephen Lang’s portrayal of the abrupt, no-nonsense Marine Corps battalion commander who takes one ruinous undisciplined misstep in John Patrick Shanley’s Defiance. “Burns up the stage” – the Wall Street Journal’s appraisal – pretty much put it for everybody.
“I don’t know why it happens,” Lang says of his playing so many men in military uniform – and one, the bitterest and most caustic of all, Moe Axelrod of Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! who no longer wears the uniform that cost him his leg in the Great War to End All Wars. “You get a certain identification,” the realist in Lang acknowledges. “They’re just terrific roles, though I have little attraction to those roles.” He is saying this between matinee and evening shows of Defiance while he stokes up on chow in the Manhattan Theater Club’s Green Room down in the catacombs of New York’s City Center.
Little attraction – or little traction?
“That too. I was never in any of the services, but I do believe in service to this country, and in my own way I try to use every show as service to the people who serve us.”
Does Colonel Morgan Littlefield bear something of a resemblance to Colonel Nathan Jessup?
“I know one thing – I know that I steal from myself,” Lang affably remarks during a recent post-performance gabfest betwixt cast and audience. It is not known if or whom he stole from when, wearing a uniform of another sort, he on TV in 1991 became Babe Ruth.
Born July 11, 1952, in the Borough of Queens, Stephen Lang, a New Yorker all the way, vividly remembers the first thing he ever saw live on stage, not in Queens but in the East 70s of Manhattan.
“What I really loved as a kid were stories, movies, adventure stuff. I’d see Errol Flynn in Robin Hood and the next week I’d be playing Robin Hood. One day when I was 6 or 7 I was walking in the city with my grandfather. He was Daniel Lang, a machinist at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Hungarian immigrant, member of the IWW, a rabble-rouser, not an educated man but a cultured man.
“I was very interested in pirates. Suddenly my grandfather pointed across the street and said: ‘Dere’s pirates, over dere.’ It was the Jan Hus Playhouse, where they were doing The Pirates of Penzance. The next day he took me there to see it. Live! Holy mackerel! I knew I had a calling.”
Time out, for a moment, to consider some words spoken in 1990 by Eugene M. Lang, businessman, philanthropist, creator and angel of the I Have a Dream Foundation to help underprivileged young people get an education, recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom, father of Stephen Lang:
[M]y father [Stephen’s grandfather], who was an immigrant to this country ,,, and was an active, ardent Socialist … came over here in 1911 because he, as a young man, decided that he would not accept the conscription into the Kaiser’s army, and the police were after him for distributing what were considered subversive documents …
[H]e had a very interesting and I think a very true philosophy … [that] the only human being that merits the dignity of the adjective “human” would be a person who was creative, someone who added something to the social condition of the community. He thought farmers who grow things, mechanics and artisans who made things, and teachers who taught human beings were really human beings. People like lawyers, bankers, accountants he classified with one word: “parasites.”
“In school,” says Eugene Lang’s son, Daniel Lang’s grandson, “we were assigned to write a letter to somebody. Mickey Mantle, Clark Gable, the President of the United States. I wrote to Bridget D’Oyly Carte, the granddaughter of Richard D’Oyly Carte, founder of the D’Oyle Carte Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Company. I asked her how old you had to be to join the D’Oyly Carte company. She wrote me back that most times you had to be 18 and a member of the British actors’ union – ‘but I’m going to make you a member,’ she said.
“In those years, Sol Hurok was bringing the D’Oyly Carte G&S to this very Center,” Steven Lang casts a gaze around the Green Room and, beyond it, above it, to take in the entire New York City Center, as if – with wild surmise – upon a peak in Darien. “I was now 9 or 10. I would go to the shows and go back [backstage] to meet the stars – to me, huge stars like Donald Adams, Kenneth Landford, Gillian Knight.”
Eugene M. Lang was a 1938 graduate of Swarthmore College, Stephen Lang a 1974 Swarthmore graduate of the class of 1973. “I was a little tardy. Got my BA in English Literature. Read Milton, read Shakespeare, read Conrad, read Henry James, read Faulkner, read everybody. I read a lot.”
Though father and son are “very close,” the son says he got no special breaks. “My father insisted on, and encouraged, and was pleased that I went my own way. I don’t feel I was in any way spoon-fed, or born on third base [within easy reach of home plate]. Nothing was taken for granted. I had jobs in the summer, worked for the highway department and for a moving company. Good money, by the hour. Moving has its own sort of drama to it. You go places where people’s lives are changing, you see how people live. Though I’m glad I’m not doing it now.”
April 15 – “tax day” – marked the 60th anniversary of the marriage of Eugene M. and Theresa Volmar Lang.
“My mother’s a Brooklyn girl from Greenpoint. A lifelong volunteer at what used to be Booth Memorial Hospital in Queens. My wife always says that the great thing about my mother is she’s the least judgmental person my wife ever met. Mom’s a lot of fun. Now she’s old [and has been ill], and I read to her a lot. We’re reading our way through Dickens.”
Lang’s first job in theater was with a road company of Charles Gordone’s free-swinging No Place to Be Somebody. “The director said: ‘I’ll give you a part, but you have to do props also.’ I had somebody do the props for me – $30 a week,” Lang says with a grin. “Got my [Equity] card, quit the show, and have just sort of been doing it ever since.”
Has he ever known somebody like Lieutenant Colonel Morgan Littlefield in real life?
“No, but some things he says and believes” – or that John Patrick Shanley has the Colonel say and believe – “are very familiar to me. Things that come seriously close to me. When he says in the big scene with his wife: ‘There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be great.’ And he also says: ‘I want one shining clean achievement,’ to which she replies: ‘Don’t you have that?’
“Well,” says the deceptively unweathered actor who was 32 when in 1984, on Broadway, he played Happy, the dumb-jock teenaged younger son of Dustin Hoffman’s Willie Loman – but sounding now just a little like a stoical, seasoned Ernest Hemingway – “you look back on all the shows you’ve done, all the work you’ve done, and you shrug your shoulders. It’s like it happened to some other person. You do it, and you move on to the next thing.” After a moment: “If you’re not creative, you’re just marking time.”
It was three years ago, Lang says, that he “had an impulse to sort of expand my responsibilities.” Larry Smith, former editor of Parade magazine “and an old basketball crony,” had written a book “that just knocked me out.” It was Beyond Glory: Medal of Honor Winners in Their Own Words (Norton, 2003). Lang, who says he himself has always written, including some screenplays, but never before a play for the stage, now did so with Beyond Glory, extracting from it, as a one-man 85-minute performance, the stories of eight Medal of Honor winners of different ethnic backgrounds, white, black, brown, Nisei, what have you. After workshopping it at the Actors Studio – “my home for the past 25 years” – and at the Flea Theater in Tribeca, where Lang and Marlo Thomas had been two of many rotating performers in the stirring 9/11 drama The Guys, he brought the Medal of Honor piece to a theater at Arlington National Cemetery, where, scheduled for four weeks, it ran for ten. And then, “after a kickoff at Pearl Harbor,” Beyond Glory, written, directed, and enacted by Stephen Lang, would touch down at some 50 U.S. military or naval bases around the world.
All but one of those eight Medal of Honor winners – all but Admiral James B. Stockdale – are still alive, but no, Stephen Lang has not met them, nor tried to. “I mean, Vernon Baker now, he’s in his 80s, an African-American, for me to go knock on his door and say: ‘Hi, Mr. Baker, I’m going to play you… ’ Lang lets that sink in, then finishes with: “Weird.”
Last year, 2005, Beyond Glory opened the season at Chicago’s Goodman Theater, another of Stephen Lang’s homes. There, in the early 1990s, he’d starred as a war veteran in Steve Tesich’s The Speed of Darkness – a performance that was to later earn Lang a Tony nomination – and there, last year, at Goodman, he would take part in a less warmly hailed production, Arthur Miller’s existential farce Finishing the Picture, about the making of the film The Misfits.
“You grind your own existence into the stuff you write,” is Lang’s noncommittal summation of his longtime friend Arthur Miller’s compulsive artistic trashing (my word, not Lang’s) of the movie star who was once Miller’s wife.
Clifford Odets is another, clearer matter. “His electric dialogue … His poetry is so natural and flows so quickly and organically. You know, he couldn’t get a part at the Group Theater [where Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing! were born.] They wouldn’t let him act.”
Well, Odets got his revenge, walking around with a notebook, writing down words and phrases that were in the air all around him, and putting them into that electric dialogue. When in 1995 director Larry Arrick called to ask if Lang wanted to play Moe Axelrod, the one-legged vet in Awake and Sing! who makes love to ill-married Hennie Berger of the Bronx with: “Listen, lousy,” Lang quickly said yes. A further lucky break in the production at the Jewish Repertory Theatre was newcomer Amanda Peet as Hennie. “You could see it right away – that she would be something very special.” Lang has much the same to say of another young woman, Marisa Tomei, a costar as the blind girl targeted for murder in the 1998 Broadway revival of Wait Until Dark: “A real thoroughbred, and I mean that quite literally. Has all the abilities of a fine racing horse, and like a fine race horse, has to be treated with great care.” He’s once again fortunate in Defiance director Doug Hughes’s choice of cool, calm, collected Margaret Colin to play sorely strained Margaret Littlefield, Marine Corps wife.
Not every actor would have accepted the role of Harry Black, the corrupt hardboiled union official who falls grotesquely in love with a transsexual in Uli Edel’s gritty, take-no-prisoners 1989 film made from Hubert Selby, Jr.’s, Last Exit to Brooklyn. But Selby is another of Lang’s longtime friends. “When you meet him, you think he’s pretty frail, but he’s tough as a bone and very resilient. At his 65th-birthday party [on the set, in Brooklyn], he was flabbergasted that he was still alive.”
Nobody should be flabbergasted that vigorous, virile Stephen Lang, slicing into his 50s, is still alive and well and living in Westchester – long after the early days in the West and East Villages – as husband to Kristina Watson and father to their four grown or growing children.
“Kristina’s from Nashville, Tennessee. We met when she was costume designer on a television thing I did in the ’70s. Now she’s a floral designer. Does parties, weddings, Bar mitzvahs, whatever. And she’s managing the renovation of a brownstone in Harlem in which we intend eventually to live.”
Daughter Lucy, 25, who should be a graduate of Columbia Law School as you read this, is in line to become an assistant DA in Manhattan. Son Danny, 21, is a junior at Tulane majoring in sociology. Noah, 18, is headed for Swarthmore next year. “He’s a film guy. His future’s in film.” Gracie, 16, is a junior in high school.
Hamlet had his Ghost. “The ghosts of Gettysburg are all quite present,” says a latter-day George E, Pickett.
Lieutenant Colonel Morgan Littlefield somehow can’t get away from the locale where Pickett led his charge, nor can the man who’s played both of them. “I don’t know,” says Stephen Lang, “I just love to walk that battlefield. I’ve been to Gettysburg many times – the high watermark of the Confederacy. The place where it was decided whether we were going to be a nation or not. If we looked at Pickett’s Charge today, we’d call it an insane thing. But that has the benefit of hindsight – a kind of aerial view of history.”
Lieutenant Colonel Morgan Littlefield, USMC, fatal flaw and all, keeps his eyes lifted beyond glory.
