Twenty-four years ago, all-around-man-of-theatre Austin Pendleton wrote a well-received play called Orson’s Shadow that had its world premiere in an admired production directed by David Cromer for Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. Since then, numerous companies, here and abroad, have produced it, its successful New York premiere, again directed by Cromer, coming in 2005. The current revival at the East Village’s Theatre for the New City, codirected by Pendleton and David Schweizer, was seen there this past spring, under just Pendleton's direction, with the same cast but one: Cady McClain replaces Kim Taff as Joan Plowright.
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| Patrick Hamilton, Luke Hofmaier. All photos: Russ Rowland. |
This play’s casting requirements are daunting. The chief
characters—seen as they were in 1960—are Orson Welles (Brad Fryman), the
controversial, overweight, American actor-director, best known for his 1940
film Citizen Kane; Sir Laurence Olivier (Ryan Tramont), whom many believe
to have shared with John Gielgud the honor of being Britain’s foremost 20th-century
actor; Vivien Leigh (Natalie Menna), Olivier’s mentally ill, soon-to-be
divorced wife, whose most famous role was Scarlett O’Hara in the 1939 movie Gone
with the Wind; and Joan Plowright, a rising actress who would marry Olivier
a year later, and is still alive today at 95. Each would be instantly recognizable
to any theatre and film lover of a certain age. A character less familiar to many
would be the great British critic, Kenneth Tynan. In 1960, Welles was 45,
Oliver 53, Leigh also 53, Plowright 21, and Tynan 33.
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| Patrick Hamilton, Brad Fryman. |
The current revival suffers considerably from the inevitable
disparity between the ages, looks, and personalities of its actors and the iconic
people they’re playing; those less familiar with the originals—probably 95% of
Gen Z—may not mind so much. Others will find the casting a major deterrent to
acceptance.
Pendleton has attempted to craft a comedy-drama based on
the circumstances surrounding Welles’s notorious
1960 Royal Court Theatre staging of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, an
exemplar of the Theatre of the Absurd, starring Olivier in the everyman role of
Berenger. It’s the part played a year later on Broadway by Eli Wallach. Olivier,
soon after demonstrating that he was not limited to classical drama by giving a
brilliant performance in John Osborne’s The Entertainer, hoped to show
his modernist side in Ionesco’s avant-garde play. It was Zero Mostel, by the
way, who stole the Broadway production in the bravura role of John, a man who,
like everyone else but Berenger, succumbs to totalitarian pressures by turning
into a rhinoceros. This past week demonstrated that Ionesco may have had a
point.
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| Patrick Hamilton, Ryan Tramont. |
Written in three acts compressed into two, with an intermission,
the over two-hour play begins with Tynan visiting Welles at Dublin’s Gaiety
Theatre, where he’s performing his “Falstaff” adaptation, The Chimes of
Midnight, to empty houses. Tynan wants to get Welles to direct Olivier’s upcoming
Rhinoceros—a play Welles dislikes—as a way of getting Olivier to hire Tynan
in some capacity at the newly gestating National Theatre, which Olivier will
head. Welles thinks that if he can get Olivier to do the play, he’ll be able to
acquire funding for a film of his Falstaff play. The action then shifts to the play’s
rehearsal process, where we meet the high-strung, petulant Larry, the over 20-years-younger
Joan, Welles’s raging bull of a director, and the disturbed Vivien, whose
marriage to Olivier is on the rocks. Sean (Luke Hofmaier), the young stage manager from Dublin, is
somehow there as well.
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| Cady McClain, Ryan Tramont. |
The rehearsals are chaotic, with multiple interruptions, and
serve to illustrate the clash of the giant egos involved, Welles and Olivier’s,
who disagree on how to play Berenger, revealing that, no matter their status, they’re
remarkably insecure. It’s hard to see how this could be of great interest to
anyone but theatre nerds; even those who remember these stars well are likely
to find this production (widely lauded in the spring) tedious, its humor flat
(although an elderly gent in front of my laughed so often I thought he was an
investor), its plot gossipy, and its characters’ artificial, regardless of how
many grains of truth they’re based on.
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| Brad Fryman, Ryan Tramont, Cady McClain. |
Most of what happened in 1960 has been well documented
(check the Wikipedia link above), and there have been numerous books about each
of the play’s principals that provide additional facts, biographical and
otherwise. Pendleton does a good job assimilating many of the established
anecdotes into the action but, despite energetic performances, Orson’s
Shadow grows increasingly tedious. Pendleton’s use of Tynan—he even serves
as the narrator—is a dramatic liberty, since the critic, although embroiled at
the time in a journalistic debate about Ionesco’s merits, had nothing to do
with the Rhinoceros production.
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| Natalie Menna. |
The bare-stage, low-budget set (by codirector David Schweizer), featuring miscellaneous chairs and tables, does little to brighten things. Alexander Bartenieff’s lighting should be noted for a couple of shock effects—coupled with startling sounds from Nick Moore—when “Macbeth” is mentioned among these superstitious actors, who insist on saying “the Scottish play.” Billy Little’s period costumes, in this context, are perfectly suitable, especially considering the budget's obvious limitations.
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| Natalie Menna, Brad Fryman. |
Brad Fryman, who plays Welles, is a bearded thespian of considerable
girth and flowing gray locks, with a decided theatrical edge. Resembling a
cross between Zero Mostel and Al Hirschfeld, he makes Welles a passionately
animated eccentric who resents being associated principally with Citizen
Kane, as if he’s never gone beyond it, and resents the Hollywood butchers
he blames for damaging his later films. Fryman, looking a decade older than 45,
and having a gravelly voice at distinct odds with Welles’s mellifluous baritone,
nevertheless has something worthy of Welles’s authoritarian demeanor; one can
even imagine him as Falstaff.
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| Cady McClain, Ryan Tramont, Brad Fryman. |
At the other extreme is Ryan Tramont, whose Larry Olivier is
a perfect twit, moving about with intense, nervous energy as if uncomfortable
in his own skin. Much as this seems written into the script, especially during
the rehearsal when Olivier displays neurotic energy when trying to figure out
how a line should be read. However, Tramont’s fidgety wimpishness only serves
to mock Olivier’s stature and dignity.
Natalie Menna’s Vivien Leigh has the unenviable task of evoking
one of the world’s great, if fading, beauties, suffering from a mental
breakdown, reflective of her oft-cited Blanche in Elia Kazan’s movie of A Streetcar
Named Desire, which she’d done on stage with Olivier direction. It drives
her to try seducing Sean, the naïve youth who says he wasn’t even born when Citizen
Kane was made, to make Larry jealous. The role and its staging is too
exaggerated to be convincing, but Menna does the best with what she has.
Cady McClain’s Joan Plowright is the most convincing of the leads;
crisply spoken and rational, she’s at opposite poles from her future husband’s
histrionics. Patrick Hamilton’s Ken Tynan, who holds the same phony cigarette
forever, rarely puffing (he’s supposed in to be a chain-smoker), speaks too fast,
his faux British accent often making his words into oatmeal. And Luke Hofmaier
is acceptably innocent (and ignorant) as Sean, whose presence in both the Dublin
and London scenes isn’t very clear.
Orson’s Shadow perhaps takes its title from the
influence Welles once cast, like a shadow, over those in his artistic world. Maybe
it comes from Welles’s once having been the radio voice for the character known
as the Shadow. Or perhaps it’s meant to reflect Shakespeare’s use of “shadow”
to refer to actors. If that regard, these lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream
sum up my reaction: “If we shadows have offended, think but this and all is
mended. That you have but slumbered here, while these visions did appear.”
Truer words . . .
Theatre for the New City
155 First Avenue, NYC
Through December 1