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Home Away
From Home

In a new memoir, former New York
Times theater critic Frank Rich reveals
how the stage became his sanctuary.

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CELEBRATION
CONNECTION
DIRECTORY

12/22
2000

72

in our
Classified Section

ALICE BURDICK SCHWEIGER

Special to the Jewish. News

1111

or former New York Times
theater critic Frank Rich, the
stage has been more than a
livelihood. It's also been a
haven that offered solace from a trou-
bled childhood.
Rich is the product of a broken home
and an abusive stepfather. Enchanting
musicals of the 1950s and '60s, like
South Pacific and Gypsy, got him
through the tough times. In his new,
poignant memoir, Ghost Light (Random
House; $24.95), Rich shares intimate
details of his family life'and tells how
his passion for the theater emerged.
The title is a reference to an old
superstition that ghosts haunt dark the-
aters, so a "ghost light" remains on at
center stage after the actors and audi-
ences have gone home. To Rich, the
ghost light is a metaphor for the illumi-
nation the theater provided during a
dark, troubled time.
"My book is a story of a young kid
who found a way to triumph over his
troubles," Rich says. "The theater gave
me the will and imaginative boost to
navigate through what was in many
ways a dark childhood."
Rich's story begins when he was a
young boy growing up with his sister in
the Washington, D.C., area. Some of
his happiest memories were that of lis-
tening to show tunes with his parents.
But at age 7, his parents divorced.
Shortly afterward, his mother married
Joel Fisher, a wealthy lawyer with a
volatile temper who had two children
from a previous marriage.
Shuffling from neighborhood to
neighborhood, Rich developed terrible
insomnia and lived in fear of being
beaten by his physically and mentally
abusive stepfather. The one bright light
in Rich's life was the theater.
The first shows he saw were The
Pajama Game and Damn Yankees, and

from the time the cur-
tain rose to the time it
went down, Rich was
mesmerized. From
then on he was
obsessed with seeing
musicals.
"I wanted a home
away from home and
the theoter became just
that," says Rich, who
began collecting
Playbills and reading Variety. "Divorce
was considered scandalous in those days
in middle-class America. Father Knows
Best and Leave It To Beaver were the big
television shows and you never saw a
divorce. So I turned to the culture
around me to find a confirmation of my
situation, and I found it in the theater.
"Although you tend to think of musi-
cals as happy and upbeat, there were
dysfunctional families on the stage.
Damn Yankees is about a husband leav-
ing his wife — it's not just about the
Yankees versus the Senators. And The
Music Man, which I saw at age 8, is
about a boy who was the same age as me
named Winthrop, who has no father.
"The theater was a cultural reflection
of my life in a way no other medium
was. It gave me more than the excite-
ment of Broadway — it gave me some-
thing to identity with."
By the time he was a teenager, Rich,
who had attended theatrical summer
camps, landed a job as a ticket-taker at
Washington's National Theater. This
gave hires entree into the backstage life
at the theater. Ironically, it was iais
tyrannical, well-connected stepfather,
Joel, who not only shared his passion
for the theater but also paved the way
for Rich to see the newest Broadway
shows.
Eventually, Rich, who went on to
earn a degree from Harvard, was able
to turn his passion into a highly suc-
cessfut career as a theater critic.
Rich's first professional newspaper job,

while he was
still at Harvard,
was at the

Detroit News.
"After my
junior year in
college in 1970,
I spent a sum-
mer in
Detroit," le
says. "I wrote
features and
film reviews and all sorts of pieces. It
was after the riots and the Fisher
Theater was dark, so instead of going
to plays I went to some of the old
movie houses — it was the pre-
Renaissance Center days.
"I lived with a college friend's parents
in Birmingham and then rented a room
in Ann Arbor. I had a terrific time in
Michigan, and Detroit holds great
memories for me."
While he never resolved his painful
childhood with his parents, his mother
and stepfather remained important influ-
ences in Rich's life. In fact, he had
ambivalent feelings about Joel until Joel's
death.
"I learned in writing this book that
Joel was a villain in some ways, yet I
loved the good parts of him," Rich
says. "He shared this love of the theater
and was encouraging for my passion
and writing, [but] he gave me mixed
messages with a capital 'M.' He gave
with one hand and took away and
slapped us down with the other."
Rich's mother died in a 1991 auto