Picture this theatrical dream-team of 1960: Eugène Ionesco’s antifascist parable Rhinoceros, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright, brought together by The New Yorker magazine’s theater critic Kenneth Tynan, to be directed for the stage by Orson Welles.
A fabulous experience—right? Well, only for the audience. What it might have taken to actually mount this production is the plot of Austin Pendleton’s play, Orson’s Shadow. Originally produced by Steppenwolf in Chicago, it enjoyed a long New York run off-Broadway in 2005. The current revival, at the Theater for the New City is (for the first time) directed by Pendleton himself.
The play opens backstage at the Gaity Theater in Dublin, where the overweight Welles (Brad Fryman) is playing Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight—his own take on Shakespeare’s Henry IV and V plays—to empty houses. It doesn’t help that the stage manager, Sean (Luke Hofmaier) is blissfully ignorant of the star’s troubled Hollywood reputation. His friend Tynan (Patrick Hamilton), racked by the emphysema that will eventually kill him, cajoles Welles into casting Olivier—whom Welles “blames” for his downfall—in an English translation of the Ionesco play, which (who knew?) none of them liked when they saw its French première!
We meet Olivier (Ryan Tramont) when Tynan maneuvers him into working with Welles; and the action moves to the rehearsal stage of London’s Royal Court Theater, where the huge, nay insufferable egos of the matinee idol and the former boy wonder cannot meet in the middle. And that’s not the only conflict Tynan is unable to resolve. Olivier is tormented over when, exactly, to leave his wife Vivian Leigh (Natalie Menna), who has not fully recovered from a widely-publicized mental breakdown, so he can marry his young inamorata Joan Plowright (Kim Taff).
Playwright Austin Pendleton, surrounded by (clockwise from left) Brad Fryman (Welles), Kim Taff (Plowright), Patrick Hamilton (Tynan), Natalie Menna (Leigh), Ryan Tramont (Olivier), and Luke Hofmaier (Sean)
There is a touch of pathos in Welles’s yearning for money to produce Chimes on film. There’s funny business over the “Scottish Play” superstition, and the need to cast the “Scottish Lady” in it. (For that and other rimshots, credit lighting designer Alexander Bartenieff and sound designer Nick Moore.) And there are some delectable bits of fourth-wall breaking.
The denouement of Orson’s Shadow is hastened when Olivier realizes he’s been cast against type as a nebbishy nobody, and Welles can’t get him to find a way into the role. We had seen Leigh earlier, upstage, on the phone; but Pendleton withholds her entry downstage until she bursts into that theatrical crisis to force Olivier to confront his own. One might wish that her electric, clutching-and-crying turn had come sooner, but it’s quite satisfying when it does.
The play rolls along nicely; and Pendleton, who’s now 82, can enjoy the thrill of having helmed a beautifully cast production, introduced people (like Sean!) to some legendary theatrical giants, and raked up some old but still poignant backstage gossip.
Top: Brad Fryman as Orson Welles
Photos by Jonathan Slaff
Orson’s Shadow runs through March 31 at the Theater for the New City, 155 First Ave./10th St. 212-254-1109
