Laurels for John Lahr

“Put ’em up, put ’em up!”

It may be a rash boast, but I feel there must be few readers as constitutionally capable of appreciating the life and career of author/critic John Lahr (b. 1941) as this correspondent.

My copy of Notes on a Coward Lion (1970), Lahr’s extraordinary biography of his father comedian Bert Lahr was so heavily thumbed through that it eventually fell apart. I’m sure many people love that book. But I imagine a much fewer number (and few of the same people) are equally interested in the other book of his published that same year Up Against the Fourth Wall: Essays on Modern Theatre, a collection of his pieces about off-off-Broadway theatre for Evergreen Review — an INVALUABLE resource for someone like me who wishes so badly he could have been there to witness that stuff. It’s got pieces on such topics as the satire of Jules Feiffer,Arthur Kopit’s Indians,Hair, Dionysus in ’69,Harold Pinter, John Osborne (in decline at the time), Edward Albee, the Absurdists, Leonard Melfi,MacBird, etc etc etc with a frame of reference that also encompasses the Broadway history both his parents were a part of (his mother was a Ziegfeld Girl).

About neck and neck with these two books for me are: Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton (1978, later adapted into a film), and The Orton Diaries (1986), which made me appreciate and understand that genius playwright even more. Then there are Lahr’s biographies and studies of Dame Edna,Yip Harburg, Noel Coward, Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter, Kenneth Tynan, Arthur Miller, Frank Sinatra, and others, and collections of his profiles and essays, the best titled of which is surely Automatic Vaudeville. He has also gotten his hands dirty in theatre-marking. The best known of those efforts was the solo show Elaine Stritch: At Liberty (2002).

The children of stars are fascinating to me. How will they wriggle out of the trap? Few follow in their folks’ footsteps and succeed. Lahr’s fellow Oz-kid Liza Minnelli was one of the few to climb that harrowing mountain. Some follow in those footsteps and become, erm, Frank Sinatra, Jr. Many steer entirely clear of the show business, but that doesn’t seem entirely healthy, either — it bespeaks a resentment, which is another sort of trap. A middle course seems best. Some, who don’t have “the bug” like Maxine Marx, or Jack Haley Jr., become agents or producers. Arthur Marx, Groucho’s son, carved out a niche for himself as a writer.

John Lahr’s path was particularly unique. Had to be. I’ve seen him in television interviews and he is NOTHING like his father. He attempted an impression of his dad in a documentary that I saw, and it was painfully self-conscious, whereas Bert Lahr was a comedian who was defined by his lack of shame. Bert would do anything for a laugh. Yet Lahr the son DID love his father’s business. Accustomed to watching, he opted to build upon that, becoming a critic and scholar of the theatre, as well as a dramaturg. This he accomplished at the very highest level. He studied at Yale and Oxford. For a time he was a literary advisor at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis and at the Lincoln Center Rep Company. At around the same time (the late ’60s) he was a theater editor for Grove Press and a contributing editor at the Evergreen Review. As a freelancer he wrote pieces for theVillage Voice, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The New Republic, and many others. From 1992 to 2013 he was staff writer and senior theatre critic at The New Yorker.

For over 50 years, Lahr has split his time between New York and London, though truly he is just a citizen of the theatre. His wife Connie Booth is the ex of John Cleese, and was a cast member on both Monty Python and Fawlty Towers as well as many other stage and screen projects before retiring to become a psychotherapist. His sister Jane Lahr, is a writer, editor, and literary agent.