Orson Welles

*“Theatre not only precedes cinema for this famous movie director but profoundly and essentially conditions all the manifestations of Welles’ genius”

*Born May 6th 1915 Kenosha, Wisconsin, which is not that far from Chicago. He was the second son of Richard Head Welles a wealthy inventor in the bicycle lamp trade, industrialist, hotelier and Beatrice Ives Welles, a well-known pianist, and suffragette. Constantly surrounded by artists and intellectuals actors, painters, writers, musicians.

“My father was a gentle, sensitive soul whose kindness, generosity and tolerance made him much beloved by all his friends. To him I owe the advantage of not having a formal education until I was ten years old. From him I inherited the love of travel, which has become ingrained within me. From my mother I inherited a real and lasting love of music and the spoken word, without which no human being is really a complete and satisfactory person.” (pg.36 Bazin)

*At eighteen months, Welles was declared a child prodigy by Dr. Maurice Bernstein, a Chicago physician. There was an article about Orson in Madison, Wisconsin newspaper said, “Cartoonist, Actor, Poet- and only TEN!” His mother taught him Shakespeare, as well as the piano and violin; he learned magic from vaudevillians. When Welles was six, his parents divorced and his mother moved to Chicago with him, where they attended the opera, theatre and concerts. Beatrice Welles died of jaundice on May 10, 1924 in a Chicago hospital. Richard Welles died when the boy was fifteen. Bernstein then became his guardian. Dr. Bernstein said before he become the boy’s guardian,

“I was astounded by the extraordinary mental maturity of the boy. He was talking remarkably sound at the age of two, and I felt sure from his appearance, demeanor and receptivity to paintings and sculptures, that he was destined to be some kind of an artist. Since his mother was such a talented pianist, I guessed the child would be musical, so I gave Orson a violin on his third birthday. Unfortunately his arms were too short for him to attempt to play it. So I did the next best thing and bought his a conductor’s baton.” (pg.37 Bazin)

So, Orson was directing before he had even seen a theatrical production before.

*Welles performed and staged his first theatrical productions while attending the Todd School and was brought under the guidance of a teacher, later Todd's headmaster, Roger Hill. While there he was also tutored by Dorothy Hartshorne, a singer and the widow of theologian and philosopher Charles Hartshorne. He also directed Elizabethan plays, and won a prize from the Chicago Drama League for the best high school production in the Chicago area but only after the jury required formal proof that the actors weren’t professionals.

*Welles left Todd School at the age of sixteen and traveled with 500$ in his pocket to Europe, the isle of Aran and then proceeded to Ireland. He made his stage debut at the Gate Theatre of Dublin, Ireland in 1931.

“Dublin was a city with a rich theatrical tradition: it was here that the Wisconsin Wonder Boy, a child prodigy and prodigal, would finally begin to astonish the world as a professional.” (pg. 38 Bazin) However the irony is that the way he started in Ireland was lying about his references

*“Theatre in the traditional sense of the word-more particularly, Elizabethan theatre- is unquestionably at the base of Orson Welles’ culture and taste, but it is equally unquestionable that is his case theatricality overflows the stage and spills into life. When the government presented the Federal Theatre from performing The Cradle Will Rock and the company found the doors of the theatre locked, Orson Welles improvised an entertainment in the street for the spectators, in formal evening attire, which afforded time to find a solution to the problem of an auditorium. When one was finally discovered, the sets were loaded onto trucks along with the actors. This amazing parade then set off, followed by the audience, until the entire procession arrived at the Old Venice Theatre, where the play’s first night took place in spite of the Washington bureaucrats. I don’t know what the critics praised most in the press the next day- the mise en scene of The Cradle Will Rock or that incredible improvisation on the city-wide scale which encompassed it: Orson Welles perched on a truck and mesmerizing the crowd like Mark Antony over the corpse of Caesar.” (pg. 40 Bazin)

*He left Dublin for England but the Ministry of Labor refused to grant him a work permit and Welles returned to America. Welles took advantage of his forced unemployment to undertake an annotated stage edition of Shakespeare’s works including numerous production notes and sketches by Welles himself. This work was assembled in a volume entitled The Mercury Shakespeare.

*Then he traveled to Morocco, working on painting and then onto Spain where he became focused on bullfighting

He returned to Chicago and met Thornton Wilder, which in turn was introduced to the celebrated actress Katharine Cornell, who hired Orson Welles to act in touring productions of Romeo and Juliet, Candida and The Barretts of Wimpoke Street

Between the end of this tour and the start of the new theatrical season, Welles amused himself in Woodstock by organizing a staging a sort of festival. It was here that he made the acquaintance of a lovely 18-year-old actress, Virginia Nicholson, whom he married. And had a girl they named Christopher, they were hoping for a girl.

*The producer of an avant-garde theatre group, John Houseman, took notice of him (while he worked in Katharine Cornell’s company) and offered him work. The job in question was to act in a socially conscious and progressive verse play, which dealt with the Wall Street crash, Archibald MacLeish’s Panic. The production had only three performances, but the Welles-Houseman association, which would last for several years, was born. As a start it would constitute the glory of the Federal Theatre.

*The Federal Theatre was a praise worthy initiative of Rooseveltian politics. To remedy the crisis in the theatre and particularly the unemployment, which had been plaguing actors since 1933, Washington decided to subsidize theatrical companies in each state. In New York, there were no less than five companies, including Negro Theatre, conducted by John Houseman. He naturally appealed to his friend Orson Welles, while he was working in radio.

The Voodoo Macbeth

*It was at this point that Welles had the idea of staging his famous black Macbeth by transposing the action from Scotland to Haiti during the reign of the black emperor Jean Christophe;

“Our purpose was not as capricious and foolish as it might sound. We wanted-indeed we were anxious- to give to Negro artists, many of whom are very talented, an opportunity to play in the sort of thing that is usually denied them. The parts that fall to Negroes are too often old mammies with bandanas, water-melon-eating piccaninnies, Uncle Rastuses and so on.” (pg. 43 Bazin)

*The play was rapturously received and later toured the nation. It is considered a landmark of African-American theatre. Welles was 20 and hailed as a prodigy.

“He reigned over his actors so that their talents served only his particular ends. In the few instances when such a rigid control was impossible, he effectively reduced the importance of the individual’s performance. Generally speaking, an actor’s contribution to a play is to interpret the content of the script. In a Welles’ production, however, content served as little more than an obvious vehicle for its expressive form. Welles’s real statement was contained in his violent imagery, and the actor became simply another facet of that imagery….

The impression it left in the theatre was that of a world steadily being consumed by the powers of darkness…..

Whether in the theatre or in films, a Welles production always made creative use of sound. For example, in Macbeth the rhythmic pounding of jungle drums serves to accentuate the mounting tragedy. So, too, do the voodoo celebrants furnish a constant aural counterpoint to the events being visualized. The primitive violence of the drums is used to add dimension to the images of civilized violence onstage, or as ironic counterpoint when the action of the play falls into a momentary calm.” (pg 54. France)

Horse Eats Hat

*After Macbeth, and again for the Federal Theatre, Welles stage Horse Eats Hat, a rather free version of An Italian Straw Hat, harking back to the Rene Clair film, which had deeply impressed him,

“Houseman went to Hallie Flanagan, National Director of the Federal Theatre, with the proposal that he be allowed to start a classical Theatre Project, sing the Maxine Elliot Theatre, which the W.P.A. had leased from the Shubert organization, as its base of operation. This became known as, simply, Project 891.

Initially, at least, Project 891 was a terrible disappointment to anyone expecting a political theatre. For its opening production Welles selected the century-old French farce An Italian Straw Hat, when he then proceeded to overhaul into a vehicle for a frankly libidinous slapstick spectacle. Knowing the particular kind of double entendre that would appeal to his audience, Welles integrated the immediacy of vaudeville into the play’s farcical structure. The result was an imitation of a popular movie comedy re-created for the stage.

An Italian Straw Hat was chosen because Houseman and Welles wanted to establish a balanced repertory, but the production soon turned into Welles’s personal joke.” (pg. 74 France)

Doctor Faustus

*Then Welles did a production of Doctor Faustus,

“The feeling prevalent among critics of the Federal Theatre was that is purpose should be to produce plays of timely significance. Viewed in this light, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus was a decided failure. But for anyone interested in the imaginative power of the theatre, the production was a resounding success.

With Faustus, Welles managed to turn a rarely produced Elizabethan tragedy into a Broadway hit. This was all the more remarkable because the 1930s was a period that was generally unreceptive to the classics. Welles stated his objectives for Faust: ‘The aim is to create on modern spectators an effect corresponding to the effect in 1589 when the play was new. We want to rouse the same magical feeling, but we use the methods of our own time.’” (pg. 90 France)

The Cradle Will Rock

*He put on a social progressive show for the Federal Theatre: a sort of satire of American political life in the form of on opera entitled: The Cradle Will Rock. In the end, Welles and Houseman received an order to abandon their opera. They refused to obey, and the police closed the theatre on opening night. Two thousand people remained in the street in front of the locked doors. Ironically, since the unions forbade the actors and musicians to perform from the stage, The Cradle Will Rock began with Blitzstein introducing the show and playing the piano accompaniment onstage, with the cast performing their parts from the audience. The show was a tremendous hit.

“Houseman reveals that an even larger part of his audience was drawn for the leftwing, particularly members and followers of the Communist Party. It was to woo this group that Houseman and Welles decided to produce The Cradle Will Rock. They were thinking ahead, beyond the Federal Theatre, to the launching of their own Mercury Theatre, and communist support meant the guarantee of an audience.

In a 1972 television interview Houseman maintained that there was no political motive behind the decision to produce the Cradle Will Rock; he and Welles ‘just wanted to put on an exciting show.’ The fact is, they had already decided to break away from the Federal Theatre and, in doing so, turned for support to the only theatrical audience then available to them – the organized left.” (pg. 100 France)

The Mercury Theatre

*The Federal Theatre was dead but the glory of Orson Welles had taken a giant step forward.

In 1937 his reputation finally enabled Welles to create his own company, again with Houseman. The Mercury Theatre was born with the help of a silent partner. Its originality lay in the ambition to present modern and classical plays in repertory, which is done by several European companies but was virtually unknown on Broadway, where the general practice was to keep plays running for several months.

*The Mercury Theatre, which included actors such as Agnes Moorehead, Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins, George Colouris, Frank Readick, Everett Sloane, Eustace Wyatt and Erskine Sanford, all of whom would continue to work for Welles for years. The first Mercury Theatre production was Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, set in fascist Italy.

*Welles assumed the part of Brutus, and they decided to play the Shakespearean tragedy in modern dress. At the height of European fascism, this modernization had an audacious impact. Cinna the Poet died at the hands not of a mob but a secret police force. According to Norman Lloyd, who played Cinna, "it stopped the show." The applause lasted more than 3 minutes. It was a great success and widely acclaimed. The play was performed without sets using only a system of movable platforms set against the bare bricks of the theatre’s back wall. It caused a stir among the critics and due to the publicity had to be revised so it could be moved to a larger more central theatre, where it ran for several months. In the spring of 1938 the Mercury presented Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House. It was a moderate success. But despite everything, the company could be done in by one big flop. Which happened with Buchner’s Danton’s Death, which had escalators where the actors lurched up onto the stage and had seventeen hundred masks glued to the back wall to suggest the masses. Then there was a final project in the spring of 1939; a synthesis of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, and Richard III, shamelessly titled Five Kings. Fifteen thousand dollars was still needed while rehearsals were going on, and it never opened.

*The Mercury Theatre died. As brief as its life had been, the Mercury had played a major role in the prewar American theatre and its influence could be compared to that of the Cartel in France. It marked an essential plateau in Orson Welles’ career. It was with the Mercury that, at the age of twenty-three, he was finally able to realize the full measure of his theatrical genius.

Radio Career

*At the same time as the production of Julius Caesar, Welles became very active on radio, first as an actor and soon as a director and producer. He played Hamlet for CBS on The Columbia Workshop, adapting and directing the play himself. The Mutual Network gave him a seven-week series to adapt Les Miserables. He began anonymously playing Lamont Cranston, The Shadow, in late 1937 (again for Mutual) and in the summer of 1938 CBS gave him (and the Mercury Theatre) a weekly hour-long show to broadcast radio plays based on classic literary works. The show was titled The Mercury Theatre on the Air, with original music by Bernard Herrmann, who would continue working with Welles on radio and in films for years. There October 30 broadcast of that year was H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.

“An unidentified announcer broke in during the broadcast with prime news of the landing of Martians in New Jersey; then , from time to time, other communications of this sort, including a ‘dramatic’ speech from the Secretary of the Interior. This was all it took for thousands, then hundreds of thousands and finally millions of listeners to believe that the end of the world had come.

It was the period of Munich, and the day wasn’t far away when an unidentified announcer would interrupt an entertainment broadcast to declare in a trembling voice that Pearl Harbor had just been destroyed by the Japanese.” (pg 48 Bazin)

*This brought Welles fame on an international level, as the program's realism created widespread panic among listeners (who believed an actual Martian invasion was underway), a panic reported around the world (and disparagingly mentioned by Adolf Hitler in a public speech a few months later.) Because of the notoriety of the production, Hollywood offers soon came Welles' way, and The Mercury Theatre on the Air, which had been a 'sustaining show' (without sponsorship) was picked up by Campbell Soup and renamed The Campbell Playhouse.

Welles also had a career in Hollywood, along with a life after the 1930s

Works Cited

*Bazin, Andre. Orson Welles; A Critical View. New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, 1978.

*France, Richard. The Theatre of Orson Welles. Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1977.

*Higham, Charles. Orson Welles; The Rise and Fall of an American Genuis. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1985.

*Leaming, Barbara. Orson Welles. New York, NY: Viking Penguin Inc, 1985.

*www.wikipedia.com