Veteran actor John Lithgow is riveting audiences in the Broadway production of playwright Mark Rosenblatt’s “Giant,” a painful exploration of famed children’s author Roald Dahl’s antisemitism.
The story, based on documents and often quoted verbatim from his writings, unfolds in 1983 in the months before the publication of Dahl’s “The Witches.” Executives at publisher Farrar, Strauss and Giroux try to convince Dahl to apologize for comments he made in a review of a book about the 1982 bombings in Lebanon.
The plot explores interactions between Dahl, a Jewish friend, a Jewish FSG publicist and Dahl’s wife, revealing not only the protagonist’s charisma and wit, but also his painfully anti-Jewish sentiments, for which Dahl’s real- life family apologized in 2020.
“Giant” is nominated for Best Play at this year’s Tony Awards. Lithgow, who’s garnered a Best Actor Tony nomination for the role tells host Robin Young he wanted to play Dahl because of his complexity, including his “witting and unwitting cruelty.” She joined him in New York after a recent performance.
9 questions with John Lithgow
You said you wait forever for a role like this, full of sadism and monstrosity and hideousness. Is that because you want to chew the scenery or because you want to find the humanity?
“It’s just a fascinating human being. Vast intelligence, a very sophisticated man who could be extremely charming. He just had this irresistible urge to test people: witting and unwitting cruelty.
“I just find it fascinating to sort of fossick around for the reasons why they behave that way, what drives them and Dahl is like a textbook case of that. You feel a kind of responsibility to bring this person’s life as accurately as you can. I certainly learned as much as I could about Dahl, including speaking to someone who knew him extremely well and kind of reported on him. That was an old friend of mine, Maria Tucci, a wonderful actress who is the widow of Robert Gottlieb, the great editor who is the man who fired Roald Dahl from Alfred Knopf for being completely insufferable and cruel.”
Peel back what Maria Tucci told you. Dahl really did feel for the Palestinian children who were killed in Israeli attacks.
“Yes. I mean, he genuinely loved children and was fiercely committed to writing well for them. He thought that was a very, very important mission of his life.
“He had several disasters befall him in his life, losing a daughter at age 7 and having a 4-month-old son hit by a taxi in his pram and suffering terrible brain damage. He was obsessively caring. And so, someone who is obsessively caring and compulsively cruel. I mean, that’s an extraordinary anomaly. And that’s what I tried to bring to life.”
Mark Rosenblatt began writing the play in 2018 when there was another conflict in the Middle East. He is Jewish and British, and he wanted to try to understand what he called this blurring between meaningful questions about Israel and antisemitism. You finished workshopping the play a month before the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel.
“Yes, my first reaction was, ‘Well, I guess we can’t do this play.’ This is now such a white hot, almost untouchable issue. And I wrote emails to Mark and Nick, the director, Nick Hytner, saying, ‘Are we still on?’
“Immediately heard back, particularly from Nick, saying, There is no better time. It has now cast this play in a bright light. They’re going to want to see a play about this.’”
In the play, Dahl is upset about the killing of Palestinian children. But he is blaming the deaths on all the Jewish people around the world about whom he says terrible things. He can’t hear that Jewish people don’t act as one.
“Yes. I mean, that’s where his politics tilts over into antisemitism. He insists that the review he wrote was simply a call to arms to Jewish people to turn upon Israel. But it’s quite clear that he’s conflating Israelis and Jews because of his innate antisemitism. He as much as admits it In the interview, that concludes the play.
“It’s just real life. It’s in real time: a play about something that happened 40 years ago that seems like it’s about right now.”
Did you ever worry that an audience member might agree with Dahl’s pain about the killing of Palestinian children. But then by the end of the play, he’s saying Jewish people are cowards. He says to a young reporter: ‘You would have gotten out of line of that concentration camp, right?’ What’s it like to deliver that line?
“You’re just giving the audience an extraordinarily complicated experience, and you feel that up on stage. You could say that he’s the villain of the piece, but he’s like a broken clock that’s right from time to time. It’s like the waves in an ocean. Their emotions just get tossed.”
Do you hear the gasps in the audience when you deliver lines like this?
“I speak verbatim things that Dahl spoke to a reporter. My last speech is like a cut and paste of things that he actually said. And every night you just hear breathless gasps and, you know, I’m in the impact business. You’re just provoking. I’ve never provoked an audience quite like this. It just made them test their own feelings and their own politics and seeing things acted out that they both agree or disagree with, sometimes in the same sentence.”
When we talked a year ago, you were very excited about another role, Dumbledore, in the new ‘Harry Potter’ television series, and you were not unaware of the irony here. Here’s another beloved children’s author, J.K. Rowling, who has made disparaging comments about transgender people. People were critical of you taking this role. How did you approach taking it?
“I took the issue very seriously and I questioned my own feelings about it. J.K. Rowling has created an amazing canon, and their stories just surface specifically about kindness versus cruelty. She just has very strong feelings in this area, many of which I disagree with. To me, that is a separate issue from actually creating a wonderful piece of work for kids.”
And I don’t suppose Dumbledore’s here in the room at all?
“No, the deeply tolerant and, incidentally, gay Dumbledore. I mean, and it is true. I mean, as far as my involvement and the people who have attacked me, you look at what I have done as an actor. I’ve played Roberta Muldoon [in ‘The World According to Garp’] and I played in this extraordinary and beautiful film ‘Jimpa,’ which is just coming out now, in which my grandchild is transgender, deeply accepting and embracing of this as am I.
“I have known transgender people, and I have heard them speak about how they simply had to do this. It was that choice or it was suicide. How can you not have compassion for that?”
Rosenblatt, this terrific playwright, he says he still reads the Dahl books to his kids and just has accepted that Dahl would not like him, a Jewish man.
“Of course, nothing changes the words that Dahl wrote. And those words are captivating. They’re just delicious to read, especially to read out loud to children. That doesn’t change it. It’s just far more colors than black and white.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
____
Karyn Miller-Medzon produced this interview for broadcast. It was edited by Robin Young. Michael Scotto adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
Copyright 2026 WBUR