Phillyist Reviews... Orson's Shadow

I think my fascination with Orson Welles started when I was really young and Tiny Toon Adventures did a Citizen Kane spoof. Not long thereafter, I read an abridged-for-kids version of The War of the Worlds, and my grandparents told me about Orson Welles' radioplay of the work—of how people who tuned in late thought that New Jersey really had been set upon by aliens. By the time I was in middle school, I'd already seen Citizen Kane at least twice. And sophomore year of high school, I wrote not one, but two papers on the auteur. (To be fair, the English and history departments had wanted us to write two papers on our historical figure of choice. I wasn't cheating the system or anything.)

So it stands to reason that I would be quite excited to see that the Philadelphia Theatre Company would be producing Orson's Shadow, Austin Pendleton's play about Welles' 1960 attempt to stage Eugene Ionesco's play, Rhinoceros, to the London stage, and fortunately, I wasn't let down. The cast of characters includes not only Welles (Wilbur Edwin Henry), but also noted critic Ken Tynan (Joe Hickey), Sir Lawrence Olivier (Brent Harris), his by-now estranged wife Vivien Leigh (Susan Wilder) and girlfriend, Joan Plowright (Rachel Botchan), and Welles' assistant, Sean (Derick Loafmann), the show's only fictional character. This excellent cast has excellent material to work with: Pendleton's script tackles real-life people with larger-than-life personalities, and makes them seem accessible to the audience: it's not difficult to believe that Welles really would insult Olivier exactly that way, or that Olivier and Leigh would have just such conversations on the telephone. Sure, the first act was perhaps a bit too expository—the second act almost stands on its own—but this was truly one of the best-written plays I've encountered in some time, moving back and forth as it does between dialogue and direct address to the audience, first by Tynan, and in the end, by Plowright. There's an acknowledgement, too, that the events happening are all, in fact, a play: the background action does not freeze when the monologues occur, but, rather, the others on the stage encourage the speaker to please not tell the audience certain things, or to stop going on about a certain topic.

James J. Christy, who is fast becoming one of my favorite directors in Philadelphia, did an excellent job instructing his actors to truly become their theatrical alter-egos as they moved about David P. Gordon's gorgeous set. While at first, Harris's Olivier might seem a bit simpering and obnoxious, as the play picks up steam (which it does, quite quickly), we see that he's actually doing just as Christy likely told him to do: play Olivier for all that the man truly was. Christy did an excellent job having his actors convey the rest of the historical figures, too: Henry's Welles almost feels like the real thing, Hickey's Tynan is impossibly proper and seems almost accidentally clever, Botchan's Plowright is as charming and capable and together as the actress seemed in her films from that time, and Wilder's Leigh swings so effortlessly into manic episodes that one feels that a real breakdown might take place any moment. And as for Loafmann's Sean, the fictional assistant who had no historical precedence on which to base his performance, well, Christy did a fine job of instructing him to be as entertaining and scene-stealing as possible. In short, all actors should be so lucky to work with a director who is so able to capture the world of a play, because that's when the audience can truly get lost in the action.

As the Philly theatre season winds down in preparation for its summer hiatus, I strongly encourage you to try to catch Orson's Shadow—something tells me it'll be taking high honors at next year's Barrymore Awards.