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The lesson learned from David Auburn's caustic and cautionary tale of political columnist Joseph Alsop, The Columnist, which premiered April 25 at the Friedman, is that people who live in glass houses don't rattle sabers in public.

One of the most controversial pundits in print in the mid-20th century, he was the strident hawk leading the battle charge into Vietnam, and he sustained that longer than readers, and reason, allowed. On the homefront, he was a man divided in an equally divided home. A closet homosexual, he married the perfect hostess for his Georgetown soirees because she agreed to settle for less — 'til she couldn't. Even the brother he shared his trouble-courting column with, Stewart, eventually fled to the tamer fields of the Saturday Evening Post ("The Norman Rockwell Weekly," as Joe derisively sneered). In the end, he is left with the typewriter he clung to for dear life.

Only by chance did Auburn stumble across Alsop's story. "I was reading about the Vietnam era, and his name popped up in a lot of places. It was clear that this was a very influential, powerful man in his day who is now almost completely forgotten. So, I guess, part of the play came out of 'How does that happen? How do you go from being in this position of power and influence to being obscure?' Finding out about that led me to writing the play." Research was a piece of cake. "There's a lot of material on Joe Alsop. There are biographies of him. There are biographies of his brother. Everyone wrote their own memoirs, and he's mentioned in a lot of Washington Insider-y histories."

Both acts begin and end with Alsop banging away at the typewriter keys until, finally, there is silence. "He runs out of words," said Auburn. "Suddenly, he realizes he has nothing left to say. I wanted to leave him with that. He's drained. In that moment, there's the realization that he's lost — that the thing that made him who he was is no longer available to him and slipping away. I wanted you to feel the loss of these people from his life. I just wanted to jump forward in time so you felt the absence of Stewart, the absence of Susan Mary — that you were with him in recognizing that he needed them, that he lost the counterbalance they provided."

It could be his height or his heft, but John Lithgow leaves one with a profound loneliness unequalled since Charles Foster Kane in His Later Years. This is Lithgow's third stage journalist in a row (following his Tony-winning Sweet Smell of Success and the giddy, gossipy Mr. & Mrs. Fitch) — and his first factual one. He pulls out all the stops and goes after the character with a blistering bravado.

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On opening night, unlike other nights, after Lithgow took his single call and motioned for his supporting cast to join him back on stage for a final bow, they refused to budge from the wings, leaving him all alone center stage with an increasingly desperate smile on his face. Throwing his arms wide open like Al Jolson singing "Mammy," he lowered himself gradually as the curtain fell.

The opening-night party was held a happy hop-skip-and-jump across the street from the theatre at Copacabana, a convenience that overrode any press complaints about this being the third opening-night party to be held there this week. As usual, the press line was set up on the second landing, and after the interviews the cast moved a flight up to party more with friends, fellow actors and Manhattan Theatre Club patrons.

The scandal that shook Alsop's career to its roots — his one-night-stand in 1954 with a young Soviet male in Moscow, replete with a series of explicit photographs that were wildly distributed courtesy of the KGB — provides the framing for Auburn's play. Alsop's frontal way of dealing with this situation and defusing the threat of blackmail is as close as the columnist ever came to profiles in courage.

"He was a courageous man, and he was sort of a sad hero," Lithgow allowed. "There's a lot I dislike about the character. I was against the Vietnam War, and he was all for it. He was an interesting man in the fact that he was an FDR liberal and so were my parents in their generation. He considered himself JFK's kingmaker. He was full of contradictions. He had a very conservative side and a very compassionate and liberal side. The interaction of those qualities is what makes him so fascinating — and he would shift gears extremely fast. The whole fun of the play is how quickly he will change — from anger to kindness or anger to hurt."

Again, research was no problem. "I read a lot of Alsop's columns. I read a fabulous biography by Robert Marin about Joe and Stewart, which really told the story. And I saw some video of him. We found video. We found audio. He was such an extraordinary character. His manners and affectations were so extreme that I had to do a sort of moderated version of it. Otherwise, I would have been too over-the-top."