Orson Welles

While the universe of film, TV, radio, and music stars glitters with stories of people who made good after childhoods in which they were underrated or underappreciated, their potential not recognized, Orson Welles was early recognized as a comet that would blaze a dazzling trail. “The word genius was whispered into my ear, the first thing I ever heard while I was still mewling in my crib,” Welles told biographer Barbara Leaming. He began mewling on May 16, 1915, christened George Orson Welles, the child of Dick and Beatrice. A head wound suffered by the young Orson brought a doctor named Maurice Bernstein into the Welles’ home. The doctor immediately sprouted the opinion that the boy was a prodigy, a genius in the making. He began calling him Pookles and Orson developed the nickname Dadda for Dr. Bernstein as the two of them began a mentor-student relationship. Dadda initiated a young Orson into a group of adults in Chicago’s music scene, which convened at the home of critic...

A sixteen-year-old Orson found his way to Ireland in 1931, and wasted little time making an impression. He auditioned for for Hilton Edwards and Micheal MacLiammoir, two titans of the Dublin theatre scene, and walked away from the experience with a small role in Jew Suss. The play was written by Paul Kornfeld, and starred Betty Chancellor and in the title role, producer Hilton Edwards. Orson’s role was the Duke, who makes his entrance into the work having raped Chancellor’s character, Jew Suss’s daughter. Orson, by dictate of his general personality and constitution, approached the challenge with nothing but the utmost confidence. He gave his performance and was surprised with a thunderous ovation at the close of the play, the audience calling his name. “That was the night,” Welles would later tell biographer Barbara Leaming , “I had all the applause I needed for my life.” And if he was in need of the praise of critics, he got a heady dose of that from no less an authority...

Orson Welles came of age as the nation descended into The Great Depression . Roosevelt was in office, and as Welles was garnering press as an upstart of the stage, the New Deal was in full swing. The WPA, Works Progress Administration, undertook the re-employment of hundreds of thousands of able workers. One of the WPA’s initiatives was the Federal Theatre Project, whose aim was to provide work for theatre folk, with a nice side effect being quality theatre productions to Americans at affordable prices. The program was allotted six million dollars and it produced a large number of performances in an array of genres. Orson Welles was involved in several of play productions, inlcuding “MacBeth,” “Horse Eats Hat,” “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus”, “The Second Hurricane,” and “The Cradle Will Rock.” Sources Coast To coast: The Federal Theatre Project. Library of Congress.

The Negro Theatre Project was a subset of the Federal Theatre Project , a New Deal program to put actors and other theatre professionals to work. The NTP had units in many US cities, including Harlem. Enter Orson Welles, whose friend John Houseman was in charge of staging plays in Harlem through the NTP. Welles got the nod to direct a production of MacBeth, and wasted no time launching it in the direction of a Haitian, voodoo theme. However, the play wasn’t set in the real Haiti, but what was, in his mind, a fictional version of it, an island that existed in myth rather than reality. Welles cast Edna Thomas and Jack Carter in the leads, and held open audition for the other parts. He then flew full swing into rehearsals, which started after midnight and often went around the clock. He referred to it as one of the most sleepless times in his life. Abe Feder, the production’s lighting director, said the company “just loved (Welles). They ate, the liquor flowed--and they wer...

Along with poet Edwin Denby, Orson adapted Eugene Labiche’s “The Italian Straw Hat” into a comic farce called “Horse Eats Hat.” At its core is a story of misunderstanding, a silly blunder. A horse eats the hat of Agatha, a married twenty-something. She is amidst an extra-marital affair and is afraid her husband will find out if she returns home without her hat. She cajoles her friend Freddy to look for a replacement. The hitch? Freddy is about to get hitched--married. He keeps his bride-to-be waiting while running around on the trivial errand for his friend. The play, in the hands of Welles, however, grew into an exploration of what is real and what is staged, with intermissions punctuated with staged kerfuffles in aisles, etc. It was the second of Welles’ FTP productions. While he was able to cast Joseph Cotten as Freddy, Paula Laurence as Agatha, and his wife Virginia as Freddy’s fiance, “Wonder Boy Welles” was finding the pickings to be a bit slim in terms of talent...

The Federal Theatre Project (FTP) kept on rolling with a New York production of The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, which opened at Maxine Elliot’s Theatre on Jan. 8, 1937. It was one of many Welles works in which he cast himself in the lead role. Also starring were Charles Peyton, J. Headley, and Bernard Savage. The rave reviews the play garnered established the (still just twenty-one year-old) Welles as one of the greatest living talents in the world of drama. The Sun judged it to be the FTP’s “principal artistic achievement.” What allows us to insert “startling” before the phrase “artistic achievement” is that during the play’s run, Welles was also recording a radio show twice a week. He’d arrive at the radio studio at 8--in Faustus makeup--buzz through his show, jump, bank robber style , into a waiting car, dash to the theatre, act in the play he was directing, and then go back to the studio to broadcast a show for the West Coast. For his radio shows, it was “hand m...