In Honor Of Orson Welles' 100th Birthday, His Early Theatre Days Remembered
Mercury
before Kane
To
the non-theatrical scholar, the mention of the name Orson Welles immediately
brings to mind Citizen Kane. However,
before his astonishing cinematic debut, Welles had already found startling
success in radio and theatre, but he may not have had such an impact on the
scene had he not been befriended, stimulated, defended and guided by John
Houseman who co-founded the Mercury Theatre with him. How these two men were
able to create groundbreaking theatrical productions—while also unwittingly
terrifying a nation with a single radio broadcast and produce what is
considered by many to be the best film in movie history—all in a span of five
years, is utterly astounding.
On August 29, 1937, a New York Times article appeared in the
Sunday Theatre Section announcing the creation of a new theatre company. The
authors of this article, Orson Welles and John Houseman, were also the founders
of this new company that they dubbed the Mercury. The manifesto, as they called
this article, started with: “When its doors open early in November, the Mercury
Theatre will expect to play to the same audience that during the last two
seasons stood to see Doctor Faustus…and the Negro Macbeth.” These
two plays had been produced by the Federal Theater Project–with Houseman as
producer and Welles as director–under the auspices of the Works Progress
Administration (WPA) without whose existence, the Mercury Theatre, Welles and
Houseman (and many more theatre companies and artists of the 1930s) would not
have had the opportunity to launch their careers in the middle of the Great
Depression.
The
Mercury Theatre can directly trace its roots back to the Federal Theater
Project, one of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs,
created in 1935 as a part of the Works Progress Administration to bring jobs to
unemployed Americans. The fact that the New York Times article mentioned “the
Negro Macbeth” is significant not
only because of Orson Welles’ incredibly bold direction of this landmark
production, but also because it marked the first collaboration between Orson
Welles and John Houseman who had hired the twenty-year old Welles, whom he had
first seen as an actor playing Tybalt in Katharine Cornell’s production of Romeo and Juliet on December 21, 1934. After
their first encounter, Houseman and Welles had several meetings together and
even though Houseman was twelve years older than Welles they both shared the
same passion for theatre and, more importantly, the same ambition and drive to
succeed.
Houseman,
who in his new position as co-director of the New York WPA Negro Theatre had
stated that one part of the Negro Theatre would perform classical plays
“without concession or reference to color”, told his new friend to choose a
classical play for him not to act in but to direct—with all black cast. Not too
long after, Houseman stated that he was awaken at two in the morning by a phone
call from Welles who announced that his wife Virginia had just had an
inspiration: their first production “would be Macbeth, laid in the island of Haiti in the early nineteenth
century, with the witches as Voodoo priestesses!” (The production was thus generally
referred to as Voodoo Macbeth). This
phone call in the middle of the night could certainly mark the beginning of
what was two years later officially registered as the Mercury Theatre.
Welles’ first request was that Houseman stay away from
all early rehearsals. Since they had selected the actors together,
Houseman—writing later in his memoir, Run-Through—stated
that he had “complete faith in Welles’ ability to direct them.” The rehearsal process of Macbeth was a telling sign of Welles’
directorial method–which could mostly be called madness without method.
Firstly, Welles drastically revised Shakespeare’s text giving the witches and
Hecate a much bigger role. This changed the theme of a man destroyed by
ambition to a man dominated by the supernatural, an element that was heightened
when Welles hired a troupe of African drummers led by an authentic witch doctor
whose first request was “to file a formal requisition for five live black goats
[which] were brought into the theatre at night and sacrificed, hugger-mugger,
according to approved tribal ritual, before being stretched into resonant drum
skins,” as Houseman recounts. Rehearsals were chaotic; a friend of the
production set designer Nat Karson gave a description of a rehearsal he
attended:
…Absolute
pandemonium, with Welles barking orders over the amplification system…“Jesus
Christ, Jack – learn your lines!” and “What the hell happened to the Virgil
Thompson sound effects between acts?”
The director of the
Federal Theatre Project, Hallie Flanagan, who had hired Houseman, later stated
that the actors were always “threatening to murder Orson in spite of their
admiration for him.” Houseman observed that Welles had a sharp instinctive
sense of whom and when he could bully or charm and that he was almost always
right and got the best out of everyone. To be fair to Welles, he was leading a
frantic daily life. In the afternoons and evenings he was working in radio in
midtown and then at night rushed to the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem for what
were many times all night rehearsals. He was also in charge of one-hundred and
thirty-seven cast and crew members in the Macbeth
troupe, and responded to his colleagues with generous acts by often bringing
food and drinks to rehearsals, paid out of his own pocket from his radio wages.
In order to gain respect and perhaps control over the turbulent actor Jack
Carter (who, according to Houseman, had been “a pimp, a killer and finally an
actor”), Welles often joined him after rehearsals in hell-raising through
Harlem’s nightspots. This served him well as one rehearsal night at around four
in the morning a few days before opening, the exhausted cast revolted. A
sweating, worn out Welles pleaded with them to stay for just a little longer,
but to no avail. At this point, Jack Carter, in full Napoleonic uniform jumped
on the parapet of Glamis Castle and scolded the mutinous troops mentioning in
one breathe Orson Welles, John Houseman, Harry Hopkins (head of the Works
Progress Administration) and the President of the United States who were all
risking their reputation on their behalf. And, in case this eloquent tirade was
not powerful enough he added: “So get back to work…You no-acting sons of
bitches!” In the end, all of their suffering paid off as the opening night of
Macbeth became one of American Theatre’s defining moments. As Wendy Smith
writes in her article “The Play that Electrified Harlem,” in Civilization Magazine:
The
lobby was so packed people couldn't get to their seats; the curtain, announced
for 8:45, didn't rise until 9:30. When it finally did, on a jungle scene
complete with witches and voodoo drums, the frenzied mood outside the theater
was matched by that within… The spectators were enthusiastic and noisy; they
vocally encouraged Macbeth's soliloquies and clapped vigorously when the second
act opened with more than half of the 100-plus cast massed onstage for his
coronation ball, a sea of colorful costumes swaying to the strains of Joseph
Lanner waltzes. After the curtain fell on the final grim tableau of the witches
holding Macbeth's severed head aloft as Hecate intoned ominously, "The
charm's wound up!" cheers and applause filled the auditorium for 15
minutes.
At the time of the April 14, 1936 opening of Macbeth, Houseman was thirty-four years old and Welles was three
weeks short of his twenty-first birthday. Macbeth
was a huge public success both in New York and on tour all over the country, even
though most critics were a little befuddled by it all due to the radical
re-thinking of the play. Percy Hammond, the Herald Tribune critic–and staunch
anti-New Deal personality–called it “an exhibition of de-luxe boondoggling”. After
Macbeth, Houseman convinced Hallie
Flanagan that he and Welles would like to form and run a new Federal unit that
would produce only classical plays and Flanagan gave them the use of the Maxine
Elliot Theatre at 39th street and Broadway. This unit was given the title of WPA Project
#891 and Houseman and Welles announced that their first two productions would
be The Italian Straw Hat, a farce by
Eugène Labiche, followed by Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. The first play was eventually
re-titled Horse Eats Hat, with
designs again by Nat Karson, orchestrations by Virgil Thompson and a score by
Paul Bowles. Horse Eats Hat opened on September 26, 1936 with Welles, his wife
Virginia, and Joseph Cotten among the cast members. It received public acclaim
but mixed reviews such as the one from Cue
Magazine which called it “a demented piece of surrealism that leaves art,
life, the audience and sometimes the actors behind it.” Even though the play ran for three months to
almost full houses the Left-Wing New York intellectuals of that time found this
Parisian farce, in Houseman words, “perplexing and vaguely reprehensible–not at
all what they had expected from the producers of Macbeth,” and some Federal Theater Project executives felt that Horse Eats Hat was not serious theatre.
Welles
was determined to counter these criticisms with Faustus. This became the most complicated of all the shows that the
Mercury produced and, according to Houseman, the most brilliantly executed
reflecting “Welles’ very special theatrical talent”. Designed like a magic
show, it had collapsible forty-foot velvet cylinders; a levitating sucking pig;
a midair disappearance of a slab of beef, two chickens and pudding; hats flying
off Cardinals’ heads; the Pope’s miter vanishing and a flash box exploding
under his robe; and trap doors all over the stage floor allowing for characters
to rise and sink at any moment. There were also explosions, underground
rumblings and toothed panes of flames that burst on the stage for a hellish
effect. Welles played Doctor Faustus and insisted on casting his old friend
Jack Carter from Macbeth as
Mephistopheles in what the New York Times
later cited as “an early and successful example of integrated casting.” Once
again, Welles drove his actors and crew hard with all night rehearsals albeit usually
around four in the morning, Welles would order hamburgers, milkshakes and
brandy. Cast and crew would stop rehearsals around seven or eight because most
people could no longer see properly and because Welles had to get to his radio
work by nine o’clock.
From opening night, The
Tragical History of Doctor Faustus was a great success and ran for four
months from January to May 1937. Harry Hopkins, the head of the New Deal’s
Works Progress Administration, came to see the show one evening, unannounced.
As he was eventually recognized, after the performance Houseman recalls having led
Hopkins backstage to Orson Welles’ dressing room where Welles:
…lay—huge
and half-conscious on a broken sofa—gasping and sweating from his descent into
hell. After the usually backstage amenities Hopkins asked us one official question. Were
we having a good time on the Federal Theatre? We told him we were.
Their following production, however, would change all that. Realizing
that their Project #891 was very theatrical but not at all socially or
politically-minded compared to all the other works being performed around New
York, Houseman and Welles decided to remedy this situation and produce Marc
Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock,
which Houseman recalled was described by many as “an opera, a labor opera, a
social cartoon, a marching song and a propagandistic tour de force.” Houseman
himself called it “America’s first proletarian musical” whose author had been
inspired by Brecht and Weill’s The
Threepenny Opera. The play was about a small town person’s efforts to
unionize workers against the corruption and greed of the owner of the steel
mill who controlled the factory, the press, the church and all social
organizations in the town. Hallie Flanagan was later admonished for being
irresponsible to let such a controversial play be produced at that time as a
few months earlier strikes in the Midwest closed seven automobile plants, and
General Motors’ President, Alfred Sloane, Jr., had just announced “his refusal
to deal with ‘labor dictators’ or to consider their ‘demands for Union
recognition and a thirty-hour week.’” In Chicago at the Republic Steel plant,
police shot and killed ten strikers (seven of whom were shot in the back).
There
were also problems brewing closer to Broadway as the first signs of an economic
recovery had started rumors of cuts and pink-slips at the WPA whose members
certain people in Congress considered to be, as Houseman stated, “bums,
encouraged by a ‘socialist’ administration…loaded with screwballs and Reds.”
Within a very short period of time these rumors proved to be true and came with
a thirty percent cut in the New York Theatre Project’s budget. Undaunted,
Houseman and Welles continued their rehearsals of The Cradle Will Rock but, on June 12, 1937 four days before its
opening, a routine memo was sent to all national theatre directors from
Washington stating that: “because of impending cuts and reorganization, any new
play, musical performance or art gallery to open before July 1st”
was prohibited to do so.” Even though the memo had been addressed to all
national theatre directors, Hallie Flanagan, Welles and Houseman were certain
that The Cradle Will Rock was the
target. Houseman and Welles immediately decided to invite as many people as
they could to the three dress-rehearsals that were left—as the memo did not
specifically prohibit audiences from attending these—and an audience of several
hundred showed up. However, on June 15th, because Welles and
Houseman’s actions had been viewed as defiance, WPA guards took over the
building, closed the box-office and blocked the removal of the “elaborate
costumes and props, and even Howard Da Silva’s toupee,” as Charles Higham
writes in his book Orson Welles, the Rise
and Fall of an American Genius. The following day, Houseman and Welles
decided that since they could not perform their production in a WPA theatre,
nothing could stop them from performing in any other theatre. Two hours before
curtain time, they found and rented the Venice Theatre on 7th Avenue between 58th
and 59th Street .
Cast, crew, musicians and an audience of seven hundred people all walked up
nineteen blocks to the Venice where The
Cradle Will Rock was performed by the cast sitting in the audience—since
they were not allowed to perform on any stage because of union rules—and Marc
Blitzstein on the stage where he played on an upright five-dollar a day rented
piano. The audience was exhilarated and the show ran for two weeks. However,
this feeling of success was short-lived as that month in New York alone fifteen
hundred WPA theatre workers received pink slips, the Federal Theatre Magazine folded, and the lease on two playhouses
were not renewed; as Houseman put it: “The honeymoon of the New Deal and the
Theatre was over.” Welles officially
resigned from the WPA and not long after Houseman received his pink slip. Even
though Houseman and Welles’ relationship with the WPA ended on a sour note due
to The Cradle Will Rock, Houseman
does give the organization full credit in terms of their theatrical artistry. Yet,
there was no doubt that it was time for them to move on and on August 29, 1937,
their New York Times article appeared
in the Sunday Theatre Section announcing the creation of a new theatre company
under the headline: “Plan for a New Theatre.”
Backed
by theatre angels, the total capitalization of the Mercury Theatre stood at
$10,500, most of which was used to fix the dilapidated Comedy Theatre playhouse
on 41st Street between 6th and 7th Avenues.
For the first time, Houseman and Welles had complete control over all things
financial and artistic, and for their first production, Welles came up with a
reedited text of Julius Caesar, and
models and drawings for his production. Costumes would not pose a problem since
Welles had decided on modern dress, as his conception of Julius Caesar was that of a political drama with clear references
to the rise of modern-day Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The actors playing
Roman aristocrats in the play wore military uniforms that suggested, without
exactly reproducing, Fascist uniforms, since these and other elements of
Fascism in Europe were well-known by Americans from newsreels. As sets, Welles
designed a series of huge graded platforms which would create depth of field and
make the stage look enormous. However, due to the Mercury’s financial fragility
and to avoid union construction costs, these platforms were built outside New
York City in an abandoned movie studio in Fort Lee, N.J., where for ten days,
“the mob scenes of Julius Caesar were
rehearsed day after day amid the whir of saws, the banging of hammers and the
perils of an unfinished set.” These platforms, once installed in the theatre,
proved to be quite dangerous as Welles had four large trap doors built into
them. As the actors complained of this danger, Welles admonished them by saying
that traps are among the oldest form of stage devices and that they should
learn how to use them and behave like professionals. Some time later during
their first dress rehearsal, all the actors playing the conspirators were in
position on stage except for Brutus (whom Welles was playing). After a search
in the theatre, Brutus was found, unconscious in the dark on the basement floor
after having fallen fifteen feet through a trap door. Fortunately, Welles
suffered only a sprain ankle. The next morning, two of the four traps were
plugged up. The first preview of Julius Caesar did not go well at all.
Welles had staged complex crowd scenes where all the actors were constantly
moving on the platforms, with sound, light and music cues just as complicated;
and all of these were missed during the preview. After the show, Welles told
the company to take their dinner break and then rehearsed the crowd scenes
until four-thirty in the morning. The following matinee preview of November 12,
1937 was attended by John Mason Brown, drama critic for the New York Post. Backstage, the cast was
gloomy and Houseman recalled that the actor George Coulouris announced “in a
voice loud enough to be heard by the entire front half of the orchestra that
while he hated to be a Cassandra, it was his considered opinion that the
Mercury would be folding on Saturday night.” Houseman states that this
off-color remark may have put the necessary fear into the entire cast because
that matinee performance proved to be absolutely flawless. At the end of the
show, John Mason Brown asked to be taken backstage where he could not stop
lavishing praises on Welles, Houseman and the entire Mercury Theatre. He
repeated all of his admiration in print in his New York Post review, stating that of all of the season’s new
productions, Julius Caesar was “by
all odds the most exciting, the most imaginative, the most topical, the most
awesome and the most absorbing. The touch of genius is upon it… a brilliant innovator…
it is pure theatre; vibrant, unashamed, and enormously effective… What Mr.
Welles and his associates at the Mercury have achieved is a triumph that is
exceptional from almost every point of view.” All trap door injuries aside, Julius Caesar became an astounding
success, and Houseman and Welles prepared to go into daytime rehearsals for
another production while they performed Julius
Caesar at night and on matinees with sold-out performances.
For
their next project, Welles decided to do an Elizabethan comedy called The Shoemaker’s Holiday by Thomas Dekker–edited
by Orson Welles. For once, rehearsals went smoothly and on Christmas Day, after
a performance of Julius Caesar,
Welles stepped out of character and announced to the present spectators that the
Mercury Theatre would like to show them a preview of their new production The Shoemaker’s Holiday. After an hour
and half break to prepare the stage, and for the audience to get some dinner,
the performance ran until passed one o’clock in the morning. Houseman recalls
that “as the theatre began to empty into Forty-first Street for the second time
that night, we knew we had another hit.” The play officially opened on New
Year’s Day 1938 to sold-out audiences.
Even
though their first two shows had been successful, they still did not cover all
of the Mercury’s expenses, and the company was going a little deeper into debt
every week. To remedy this, a tour of Julius
Caesar was arranged with another cast, while its Broadway production was
moved two blocks west to the larger National Theatre. The Shoemaker’s Holiday played at the Mercury Theatre and The Cradle Will Rock re-opened at the
Windsor Theatre. With three shows running at the same time, the winter of
January 1938 proved to be the heyday of the Mercury Theatre which then started its
newest project. Casting began for George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House. Welles decided that he wanted a realistic set for
Shaw’s play but the half ship, half living room description in the play cost
the Mercury a fortune to build especially since Welles insisted on “genuine
paneling indoors and real gravel cemented to the ground cloth for the exterior
‘so the footsteps will sound right’”. Mr. Shaw’s royalties were also quite
high; fortunately Heartbreak House
became the Mercury’s fourth consecutive success, even though the reviews were
respectful but not lauding. All in all, the Mercury Theatre finished its first
year with about half the finances left from its start, but this was only
because all four of their plays had done very well at the box-office.
For
their second year, Houseman and Welles decided to first produce two plays, Too Much Johnson, an early 20th
century American farce by William Gillette, and in contrast, Danton’s Death by Georg Büchner. After
these, Welles would present the incredibly ambitious Shakespearean project
which he had entitled Five Kings: “a
compressed and edited version of all the histories except King John and Henry
VIII…that was to be in two parts…performed on successive evenings with the same
cast.” This massive undertaking, according to Houseman, seemed to have been
Welles’ attempt to take a decisive blow to the British actor Maurice Evans who
was his greatest Broadway competitor in the matter of Shakespeare and who “had
had the effrontery to follow his much acclaimed Richard II with a successful Falstaff – a part which Orson regarded
(as he did every great classical role) as exclusively his own. Five Kings, by its sheer magnitude,
would reduce Mr. Evans once and for all to his true pygmy stature.” Because of
the expense of such an undertaking, Houseman was able to convince the Theatre
Guild to co-produce the Five Kings
with the Mercury and offer it as part of the Guild’s subscription for the
following winter.
With
the success of the Mercury came an unprecedented radio contract with CBS for
Welles to do an hour radio show, on which he could do anything he pleased,
entitled First Person Singular, “‘written,
directed, produced and performed by Orson Welles.’” With this contract, he was
able to bring all his Mercury Players to act on his radio show with him and
eventually even renamed the show: The
Mercury Theatre of the Air. Hiring Houseman as his co-writer/editor, Welles
and he embarked on a dual full-time career in Theatre and Radio, but, as Houseman
stated in Run-Through: “Such was our
self-confidence and our blind faith in our own unlimited energy that, as we
signed our new contract, we neither of us, for one instant, questioned the
wisdom of trying to combine a weekly national radio show with the running of a
full-scale repertory theatre in New York City.”
Houseman and Welles started their second season
rehearsals of Too Much Johnson with Welles’ conception of this play extending
beyond theatre. He decided that the play would start with a prologue in which
the characters were to be introduced in a film sequence projected in the
theatre. A second film would then appear later on in the production. Both of
these films would be comic chases: the first through the streets of New York
City and the second through a Cuban setting. The cast included Joseph Cotten,
Virginia Welles, Houseman and other Mercury Players playing Keystone Cops.
Silent camera in hand, Welles filmed in Central Park in a rainstorm; had Joseph
Cotten jumping over roofs of the Washington Market; and forced Houseman, in a
tropical suit wearing a pith helmet, to fight a saber duel on the very edge of
New Jersey’s Palisades cliffs overlooking the Hudson all the while yelling at
him to get closer to the edge. Welles kept filming until they ran out of money
and moved into the St. Regis Hotel where he
installed a Moviola editing machine and edited the movie himself, surrounded by
“thousands of feet of film” trying to splice together all of his chase
sequences. During a try-out of Too Much
Johnson at a small summer theatre in Connecticut, the films were not
screened because Welles had not finished editing but mostly because they had no
money left to pay the laboratory that refused to release a print to them. The
audience’s response was unfavorable. Having spent more time filming than
rehearsing the play, Welles did not realize that his production was, in
Houseman’s words: “trivial, tedious and under rehearsed.” It was decided to
change the order of the bill and start with Danton’s
Death instead which meant having a dark theatre and putting the entire
Mercury cast and crew on full pay for another month. The disastrous opening of Too Much Johnson was a huge blow to
Welles who locked himself in his St. Regis suite for one week in total darkness
surrounded by twenty-five thousand feet of film, only emerging out to do his
radio show. Houseman recalls this event
as a turning point in the Mercury and in Welles whose “troubled emotional state
continued to be reflected in his creative activity: it helped to explain the
indecision and doubt that were beginning to infect his work in the theatre and
it added to the difficulty we experienced as we tried to recapture our working
rhythm at the Mercury.” Rehearsals for Danton’s
Death were done in a state of anxiety fluctuating between inertia and
suffocating tension. Complicating these matters was Welles’ conception of the
set: brilliant in every way and a mechanical nightmare to operate; it was made
of a “huge, curved wall, formed entirely of human faces that filled the rear of
the stage from the basement to the grid.” In the last scene, as Danton and his
followers go to their execution, the whole back wall opened and revealed a slit
bathed in blue light topped by the glittering steel of the guillotine whose
blade flashed down as the lights black out. In front of the black wall was a
vast pit where a huge elevator would carry up and down sets such as a salon, a
prison cell, the upper floor of a structure, and, at the end of the play, the
guillotine platform. Low on funds, the Mercury could only afford an old
elevator which did not properly work. Every night at rehearsal, Welles would
change the order of scenes and speech sequences and with every change there had
to be another lighting scheme change as well. Once again, all-night rehearsals
became the norm and mattresses were dragged into the aisles for people to sleep
on. Houseman stated that:
Orson
would not stop. He drove himself and the company with no sense of time, to no
apparent purpose and with no perceptible feeling. It was a though he expected,
by continuously increasing the pressure, to strike some new well of inspiration
that would save us all.
One evening, a week before the previews, Welles, who had spent two days
and nights re-writing the play, arrived at the theatre only to realize in
terror that he had just left the original revised text of the play in the taxi
that had brought him to the theatre. Phone calls to all the taxi companies and
even to the police were made but to no avail. On another night their raggedy
elevator crashed, breaking the leg of one of the actors. Houseman had to cancel
the two upcoming previews and postpone opening night. In all, five previews
were cancelled until finally Houseman–having gone over their finances–refused
to postpone another opening night. The date for the opening show was firmly set
for Wednesday November 3, 1938, two days after the Mercury Theatre’s Radio Show
for that 30th of October, which ran an episode called The Men from Mars, but better known as The War of the Worlds.
Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre of the Air were
front page news for two days after their radio show created a massive panic
attack all over the United
States .
If their The War of the Worlds
radio show generated huge publicity for them, it unfortunately did not
translate into box-office for their play. Danton’s
Death opened to several poor reviews, except for The New York Times, and the public stayed away. After only
twenty-one performances, Danton’s Death
closed and the Mercury was broke. As Houseman remembers:
It
all happened so quickly and quietly that we never knew what hit us. Even now it
is difficult to explain how one single setback (which by the law of theatrical
averages was long overdue) could have annihilated an organization with such a
fantastic record of unbroken success and acclaim…We were broke. With the
ruinous cost of all those incessant, all-night rehearsals and the endless
postponements that had meant carrying the entire company and staff at full
salary for two months beyond our original opening date, we spent every cent of
the money I had raised with such difficulty for our entire season…But it was
not money, or the lack of it, that destroyed us…The truth is – we were no
longer interested. In the grandiose and reckless scheme of our lives, the
Mercury had fulfilled its purpose. It had brought us success and fame; it had
put Welles on the cover of Time and our radio show on the front page of every
newspaper in the country. Inevitably, any day now, the offers from Hollywood would start
arriving. It was too late to turn back and we did not really want to.
In mid-December 1938, the Mercury abandoned the theatre and shut down the
organization. However, the Five Kings
project to be co-produced by the Theatre Guild was still alive, with the Guild
financing it almost entirely while all artistic decisions were to be made by
Orson Welles. But, according to Houseman, Welles became more and more
extravagant in his spending, with each meal a feast, a consumption of one to
two bottles of whisky or brandy per night, a grandiose apartment with huge
furniture that had to be brought in by crane through the double windows, and
constant sexual escapades. It was in this vein that Welles undertook the Five Kings venture which he intended to
be his crowning Shakespearean achievement as he took the text from eight of
Shakespeare’s plays and re-edited them into a single plot over a long period of
time. However, this ambitious project and Welles’ unconventional work process
proved to be too much as, according to Houseman, “rehearsals were undisciplined
and desultory from the start. It was Danton
all over again–without the tension and with a lot more alcohol.” Five Kings marked the beginning of the
deterioration of Welles’ relationship with Houseman. Three days before the Boston opening, Welles
asked Houseman for a postponement which would have been possible had this been
a Mercury production, but now that the Theatre Guild was involved it was out of
the question. Welles panicked and turned his rage against Houseman. He called
him a traitor who had exploited him and sold out to the Guild, then ripped a
pay phone from off the wall and threw it towards Houseman. The show opened as
planned on February 27, 1939 at 8:00 o’clock, with Orson Welles playing
Falstaff and Burgess Meredith as Prince Hal, and ran with two intermissions
until one in the morning. The reviews were not very good. Welles cut out
forty-five minutes for the rest of the Boston
run but insisted on more all-night rehearsals which the Guild refused to pay as
it would put cast and crew on overtime. Welles then borrowed against his future
radio earnings and paid for the rehearsals with his own money (something he
would repeatedly do throughout his film career). They went on to Washington and Philadelphia
where, for some unknown reason, the electrical current of that city was not the
same as all the others in America .
This meant that the elaborate revolving set could not turn and the actors’
blocking was disastrously off. The following morning, Lawrence Langner of the
Theatre Guild told Houseman in the lobby of their hotel that the Guild was
“withdrawing its sponsorship of Five Kings and the Mercury would be solely
responsible for all expenses incurred from that time on.” Welles made frantic,
desperate attempts to find backers but to no avail.
Even though the Mercury Theatre was
no more, the Mercury Players and their radio show continued. Welles and
Houseman still edited and produced these shows until June 1939 when Welles
received an unprecedented offer from RKO Pictures in Hollywood to write,
produce, direct (and perform in) two feature films on a subject of his own
choosing with full final cut decision and no studio interference. The first of
these film projects, whose early screenplay draft title was American, became known as Citizen Kane.
Orson Welles was once quoted as
saying: “Theatre is a collective experience; cinema is the work of one single
person.” For all of Welles’ reported egomania and megalomania, when he received
the offer from RKO to move to Hollywood, he took with him not only the name of
the Mercury Theatre but all of his players who wanted to join him (fifteen of
them appeared in Citizen Kane), his
composer Bernard Herrmann and several assistants. The opening titles on Citizen Kane state “A Mercury
Production…” and during his cinematic career, seven of Orson Welles’ best films
were done under the Mercury Production banner. Another a little known fact is that
the first drafts of Citizen Kane were
written by Herman J. Mankiewicz and
John Houseman. According to Higham, Houseman in the Spring of 1940 spent
several weeks in a rented house in Victorville, California, guiding Mankiewicz (and making sure that he
didn’t drink himself into a stupor as was his usual habit), all at the request
of Welles’ and on full salary (Welles then re-wrote the script with Mankiewicz in June 1940 and later made
more changes on his own).
The Mercury Theatre’s rapid rise,
short but brilliant life and abrupt demise on the New York stage was more than a shame. It was
also a foreshadowing of Orson Welles’ career and life: the rise and fall of a
genially talented artist, whose life can easily be compared to any great
Shakespearean tragic character that he so loved to portray, full of pity and
fear, with only too few brief moments of glorious brilliance.
Alain G. Cloarec, New York City, May 4, 2015
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