Marvelous Boy

(See front cover)

Art theatres, experimental theatres, repertory theatres are like frail children. They get the most devoted care, but seldom get any exercise, grow any muscle, gain any weight. In the quarter-century before 1937, Manhattan saw only four such theatres survive adolescence: the Theatre Guild, the Provincetown Hay-house, the Civic Repertory Theatre (thanks to Director Eva Le Gallienne), the Group Theatre (thanks chiefly to Playwright Clifford Odets).

When Broadway heard last summer that two up-&-coming young men were starting a new repertory company, play-goers waited with lively interest but natural distrust to see what Orson Welles, 22, and John Houseman, 35, would do with their Mercury Theatre. One bedrock essential that Welles & Houseman apparently lacked was cash. But after a succession of muffled death-rattles backstage, the Mercury came to its first play's first night. On November 11 it produced Julius Caesar. On November 12 the public was informed that Shakespeare's five-act classic had: 1) been turned into a one-act cyclone, 2) on a bare stage, 3) in modern dress, 4) with a modern meaning, 5) gone over with the loudest bang that Shakespeare-lovers could recall. And decidedly First in Rome had been Director Orson Welles for managing the entire production, Actor Orson Welles for making Brutus come alive in a blue-serge suit.

With his Caesar a smash hit, Welles flung his laurel wreath into a cupboard, backed Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock--the sceneryless, music-quickened strike play which a scared WPA had dumped overboard the season before-- and The Cradle rocked like mad. Then, having enough of boom and roar. Welles and the Mercury turned back to Elizabethan times for a bellylaugh, rigged up Thomas Dekker's bawdy, roistering The Shoemakers' Holiday. That was a success too.

"Who Are You?" To conclude the season, the Mercury chose to revive Shaw's Heartbreak House for its "timeliness." Negotiations with Shaw were characteristic. His first cable ended up: "Who are you?" Finally cabling permission, he stated that terms "would not be too unreasonable." Without the least notion of what the cagiest bargainer among living dramatists would consider reasonable, the Mercury took on the financial gamble with the same light-heartedness with which it took on the cumbrous play itself. When Heartbreak House was presented last week under Welles's direction and with himself in the leading role of 88-year-old Captain Shotover, even the dottiest Mercury fan could not help having qualms. For this more-than-three-hours-long,* brilliant Mad-Hatter symposium on modern life is among the most difficult of Shaw's major dramas: garrulous, subterranean, exhaustive. But, skirting a forest of unintelligibility on the one side, and a swamp of tediousness on the other, Welles has cut a clean if slightly winding road, has achieved a capital production.

Heartbreak House is the one play that G. B. S. himself has refused to explain. "How should I know?" he told actors who asked him what it meant: "I am only the author." But Shaw provided meaning enough when he asserted that Heartbreak House is "cultured, leisured Europe before the War," just as he evoked mood enough when he acknowledged that Chekhov had sounded the same music in his Cherry Orchard.

Here, at any rate, under the aged Shotover's crazy roof, are inert, frightened, hamstrung individualists who in moments of terror can double up their fists but otherwise stand by, dazed and helpless. The world of Heartbreak House is not merely running down, it is cracking up: and in that dangerous hour the pretensions of its people--who represent an entire civilization--are mercilessly exposed by a playwright who despises them. If, on the one hand, these characters are the prototypes for all the bughouse comedy that has recently come into vogue, on the other hand some of theare Hamlets feigning madness to avoid going mad in earnest. Heartbreak House has the deceptive structure of an accordion: pushed in, it looks like a congested comedy of eccentrics; but pulled out to its full length, with Captain Shotovers booming prophecies, with its stabs of pathos, with its acrobats who suddenly are transformed into an anguished Laocoon group, it utters an almost Biblical warning. As for the "timeliness" that the Mercury Theatre noted, there are speeches like Shot-over's: "The Captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled ditchwater; and the crew is gambling in the forecastle. She [the ship] will strike and sink and split. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favor of England because you were born in it?"

Pluck 6 Luck. If the career of the Mercury Theatre, which next week will be six months old, seems amazing, the career of Orson Welles, who this week is 23, is no less so. Were Welles's 23 years set forth in fiction form, any self-respecting critic would damn the story as too implausible for serious consideration.

George Orson Welles (the George is for George Ade, a family friend) is the son of an inventor and a concert pianist. His father, Richard Head Welles, invented among other things: 1) a mechanical dishwasher which broke all the dishes, 2) a collapsible picnic set which the Government bought in large quantities for doughboys and which, according to Son Orson, "contributed greatly to the horrors of the War."

Born in Kenosha, Wis., Orson before the age of ten was a professional actor, ma-ing $25 a day dressed up as Peter Rabbit in Chicago's Marshall Field's. At twelve, in the progressive Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Ill., Orson was staging his first production of Julius Caesar--in which he played the Soothsayer, Cassius and Marc Antony with relay-race technique.

At 16, Orson set out on a painting tour of Ireland with $500, ended up in Dublin with nothing. Going backstage at the Gate Theatre one night, he announced he was a Theatre Guild star. On the strength of this whopper he was respectfully handed the part of the Duke in Jew Suess ("an actor's dream," says Welles, "what with a seduction scene, a murder scene, and a deathbed scene"). He spent that season in Dublin, acting at the Gate, the Peacock the famed Abbey Theatre.

Followed two short bumps. Moving on to London, Welles could not repeat his Dublin fireworks because the Labor Ministry refused him a working permit. Back in Manhattan, he spent a day in the Shubert casting office, hourly scaling down his ambitions from lead to secondary role to walk-on--until, unnoticed, he finally walked off. sailed for Morocco where he wrote a school text, Everybody's Shakespeare.

Back in the U. S. again, Welles met Thornton Wilder, who gave him a letter to Alexander Woollcott, who got him to Katharine Cornell, who took him on tour to play such roles as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, Marchbanks in Candida. Following the tour, he played Tybalt in the Cornell Romeo and Juliet in Manhattan. In the audience one night sat John Houseman, who at 29 had got out of the grain business, had staged the Gertrude Stein Four Saints in Three Acts, was about to produce Archibald MacLeish's Panic. Impressed by Welles's acting, Houseman went backstage after the performance, signed him up to play the lead in Panic. The play ran only its scheduled three nights but proved another milestone for the actor, the beginning of a close association between Houseman and Welles.

Shadow and Sustenance. That same year, Welles got started in radio, until this year his financial mainstay. An audition with MARCH OF TIME landed him a job there. Others followed. His best-known radio role, which he still plays, is The Shadow. Since March 1937, Welles has been Lamont Cranston, a millionaire playboy who foils evildoers by night, murmurs sepulchrally: "The Shadow Knows. Ha-ha-ha." Radio has averaged Welles $1,000 a week; last summer for two or three weeks he hit a high of $1,700.

Meanwhile Welles & Houseman took over the WPA's Negro unit in Harlem, decided to do Macbeth as jungle melo drama. Strapped down to a WPA budget, Perfectionist Welles used his own money to buy just the right tom-toms, beat Mac beth into a noisy success. Then Welles & Houseman marched down to Broadway, put on other WPA shows, culminating in the smashing Welles production of Dr. Faustus.

It was The Cradle Will Rock that ended the WPA career of two young men aching to set up for themselves. With a scared Federal Theatre on the mat for putting on too many labor plays, the day The Cradle was to open came a fiat that it was not to open. Welles & Houseman borrowed a theatre, and (since Equity for bade the actors to use the stage) inaugurated a new type of entertainment with an impromptu performance in the aisles.

The rest of Welles's story is all Mercury Theatre, but the Mercury Theatre was a lot of things before it became Broadway's wonder child. It was first just an idea, bounded north & south by hope, east & west by nerve. Crossing their Rubicon before they even started to march, Welles & Houseman leased the Comedy Theatre for five years, renamed it the Mercury, then started looking for their first play. When they found Julius Caesar, they started looking for the money to produce it. Houseman combed Wall Street, got dibs & drabs, enough to keep the cast stringing along and repair the Mercury toilets. He also got promises of $12,000; then the recession came and two of the Mercury's seven angels had their wings clipped. Though Caesar was already in rehearsal, it looked as if it might never open. But Archibald MacLeish came in as liaison officer, got some fresh backing for the Mercury from Playwright Clare Boothe, Theatre Lover George Hexter.

An advance sale of $8,000 finally saw the Mercury through the opening night of Caesar, which all told cost $16,000 to get under way. After that, finances were a pleasure. Today Welles & Houseman own 70% of the Mercury which, sticking to a $2.20 top, has had an average gross of $6,000 a week, an average net of $1,000.

In Person.With a voice that booms like Big Ben's but a laugh like a youngster's giggle, Orson Welles plays lead off stage as well as on. He loves the mounting Welles legend, but wants to keep the record straight. Stories of his recent affluence--the Big House at Sneden's Landing, N. Y., the luxurious Lincoln town car and chauffeur--annoy him. First of all, Welles insists, this has nothing to do with his Mercury triumphs; for years he has had these things by virtue of his radio earnings; and second, the Big House isn't such a big house (eight rooms and four nooks, $115 a month), the car is secondhand, and the chauffeur exists because Welles himself doesn't drive. Says he: "I'm one of those fellows so frightened of driving that I go 80 miles an hour--and the more frightened I get, the faster I go." At Sneden's Landing--20 miles from Times Square across the Hudson--Welles has for neighbors Katharine Cornell, Columnist Dorothy Thompson ("whom I do not admire"). Welles met his wife, dainty, blonde Virginia Nicolson Welles, while both were acting in a summer drama festival in 1934, married her that fall. Last month their first child was born. A girl, she was christened Christopher.

As active as a malted-milk mixer, Welles is for all that very heavyset, his adolescent moon face slowly beginning to resemble a Roman Emperor's. Told he looks Roman, he asks interestedly: "Do you mean sensual?" His own description of himself: "I look like the dog-faced boy." Troubled by his asthma, untroubled by his flat feet, Welles gets a little exercise walking and fencing, most by directing and rehearsing. He starts off a Falstaffian meal with a dozen oysters, tops it off with a big black 75-c-cigar.

At fhe Mercury, Houseman runs the business end, Welles is Caesar (not Brutus) where stagecraft is concerned, and in his own opinion "pretty dictatorial." Welles does all cutting and rewriting, and does it with a fearless hand. For the much-applauded episode of Cinna the Poet in Julius Caesar, Welles cooly snitched lines out of Coriolanus. When a Mercury actor was asked when rehearsals on one of the season's classics would begin, he answered: "As soon as Orson has finished writing it."

Welles's catholic tastes include Broadway, swing music, the cinema, but he has no hobbies. "I am essentially a hack, a commercial person. If I had a hobby, I would immediately make money on it or abandon it." How much money Welles is making he will not say. He is not even sure he knows. His habit at the Mercury is to draw "what he needs" from the box onice usually, the box office reports, some $200 a week. Houseman does the same. Says Welles: "Houseman and I aren't making enough money to cheat each other."

Next? Welles is full of ideas for next season's Mercury, though there are no announced plans beyond Five Kings, which will be tried out this summer and produced for the Mercury by the Theatre Guild in the fall. Five Kings will be a double-header performance telescoping Shakespeare's chronicle plays: the end of Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I & II, Henry V, Henry VI, Parts I, II, III, and Richard III. Welles will direct the whole enterprise, and play Falstaff. The Theatre Guild will supply part of the backing and the fat pickings of its 60,000 subscription list, but the Mercury will have full artistic control.

Shadow to Shakespeare. Shoemaker to Shaw--all in one season--might be a whole career for most men, but for Welles it is only Springboard to Success. Nor does he want the Mercury to pin all its faith on the classics: he pines to do a real mystery, a real farce, a British pantomime, a fast revue, a Mozart opera. He has shown in Heartbreak House, with its careful, elegant sets by John Koenig, that the sceneryless stage of Julius Caesar and The Cradle Will Rock was not the fetish of a flash in the Pantheon, but simply a well-timed theatrical stunt. The brightest moon that has risen over Broadway in years, Welles should feel at home in the sky, for the sky is the only limit his ambitions recognize.

*When the Theatre Guild produced Heartbreak House in 1920, a violent crisis arose with Shaw when the Guild suggested cutting it. The Mercury made no such suggestion. Said Welles: "The play's not good enough to cut." In the next breath: "It's the greatest play of the last hundred years.''

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