Orson Welles, Vol I Read Free Page B

major real estate operations, City, State, Federal participation and that of two or more gigantic foundations’; and he was writingtwenty-fiveyears ago. Welles meanwhile was assembling his company of thirty-four – another unimaginable statistic in the present age, when only the very largest subsidised theatres can think of casts of even double figures. No longer obliged to absorb the assorted vaudevillians and superannuated tragedians that formed the FTP’s standing army, but equally unable to afford a standard Broadway company (they offered$40 per week, with $25 for junior members, on no binding contract; anyone was free to leave at two weeks’ notice), Welles made a statement of intent which was seen as a sort of clarion cry to the non-established profession: ‘We are enlisting the co-operation of those actors and musicians who, whether they have had theatrical experience or not, seem to us best suited to work in the theatre. Wehope to develop a company of actors who will be prepared to revitalise the classics and be able to turn from them more keenly attuned and aware, to handling great plays of the contemporary scene.’
    Over the course of the season, more than 3,000 people auditioned for the thirty or forty available jobs. Welles never ceased insisting that the actor was the central unit of his theatre, and thedream of a company in the European manner, such as America had scarcely known, each actor being nurtured and challenged not at the expense of but to the greater glory of the whole group, exercising itself on a repertory of the world’s masterpieces, was one of the most potent parts of the Mercury’s appeal within the profession. Welles had seen the great companies with his own eyes on their own territory;he knew what he was talking about. But did he know how to create a company? The ambition alone, the mere vision, were remarkable enough in a twenty-two-year-old. If he could actually lay down the foundations of a genuine ensemble, then he would be not merely prodigious, but a master.
    Welles’s actors were drawn from pretty well the same pool as Houseman’s: the Federal Theatre Project, chumsand new recruits, plus a number of people he had encountered in radio studios. These last included Elliott Reid, at seventeen years already, like Welles, a veteran of The March of Time , Martin Gabel (whose ‘gravid voice had made him, in his early twenties, one of the country’s most successful and sexy radio actors’ according to Houseman), and the fifteen-year-old Arthur Anderson, star of a showin which Welles also appeared as The Big Ham, a wandering actor-manager, veddy British and querulous unless he has his kettle and teapot. The presence of these radio actors in the Mercury company was not accidental: Welles placed enormous and, even in 1937, old-fashionedstress on the importance of the voice. ‘Emphasis has been placed on infusing language with as much beauty as the actors canlend through voice and expression. Language never lives until it is spoken aloud,’ 5 he said in an interview early in 1938. He favoured actors with classical experience, including two actors from the London Old Vic, George Coulouris (who was English) and the Austrian actor Stefan Schnabel (son of Artur); a RADA-trained American actor, Joseph Holland (who had a photograph of Irving on the wall ofhis tiny one-room apartment); and John Hoystradt, who had toured with Welles in Romeo and Juliet .
    The two female members of the company, Evelyn Allen and Muriel Brassler, had solid stock experience. Joseph Cotten was invited, of course, and Chubby Sherman, and Francis Carpenter; and an unexpected recruit, Norman Lloyd, leading actor of the Living Newspaper, star of its big success, Power ,an actor equally versed in the theories of Stanislavsky and Brecht, and, like many of his generation, suspicious of what he felt to be Welles’s actor-managerial ways and ‘chin-up-to-the-balcony’ acting. For these actors, the great innovation of the