This is Welles on fire

Legendary director casts long, corpulent “Shadow”

Reviewed by Lee Brady

Genius is on display in a pair of local productions this month. The first is Orson’s Shadow, with actor Steve Irish wonderfully re-creating the rotund actor/director/producer and one-time husband of Rita Hayworth. This last fact comes up frequently in Austin Pendleton’s play about a play. Clever dialogue bounces off the back wall as Kenneth Tynan (Liam Vincent), Laurence Olivier (Nicholas Hormann), Olivier’s about-to-be-wife Joan Plowright (Deborah Taylor Barrera), his current wife Vivien Leigh (Amy Resnick) and Welles reveal an inconvenient truth about fame: Being a theatrical legend means you are already a historical character. Young Sean (Zac Jaffee), the wide-eyed and overworked stage manager, is the only one in this group with a future.

The play opens in 1960 on a small stage in Dublin, as Tynan tries to convince an offstage Welles that directing Olivier in Rhinoceros will burnish all their reputations. (Pendleton’s play is based on a real event.) Welles needs the money to make a film (his undependable reputation has made him unbankable); Olivier wants to continue his move away from the classics (he’s just had success in John Osbourne’s The Entertainer). But the two artists have such a bad history between them that it takes Tynan the whole first act to get his show going. The second act begins two weeks into rehearsal and it is already a disaster. Lee Sankowich directs and his love of backstage drama – and comedy – comes through as the actors take on the legends. All the while Orson Welles casts his dark shadow–– one that illuminates the future of all the legends involved.