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"Orson's Shadow' at PTC (second review)
Dan Rottenberg
All the world's a stage, and it's enough, already
DAN ROTTENBERG
Long ago and far away, two formidable giants of their time tried to revitalize their stalled careers by forging an alliance despite their mutual enmity. Could this be Hitler and Mussolini in A Perfect Day? Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen? Lincoln and Douglas in The Rivalry?
No, it’s Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier, collaborating on a 1960 production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.
The characters’ histrionic overacting, interrupting and mutual shushing notwithstanding, the fate of the planet— or even their careers or their personal lives— doesn’t exactly hang in the balance in Orson’s Shadow. But Austin Pendleton’s worshipful script refuses to confront this inconvenient truth as he plunges us yet again into another exercise in actors acting as actors obsessed with acting. These people and their spouses and friends (Vivien Leigh, Joan Plowright, Kenneth Tynan), Pendleton assumes, are famous names of the theater; therefore they must be interesting people whom we must care about. Isn’t that why we read gossip columns? Maybe; but on the basis of this exercise in theatrical navel-gazing, that point is not proven.
“Am I to be remembered for one movie that I directed from my high chair?” the Welles character asks plaintively at one point in Orson’s Shadow. To which I would reply: “If that one movie is Citizen Kane, the answer is ‘yes.’ And aren’t you glad you’ll be remembered for anything, long after most of us are forgotten? For that matter, aren’t you grateful you’ve lived in a free and prosperous society where your genius could flower, when most of the world’s potential geniuses of the past few millennia have been smothered?”
Of course such an answer doesn’t occur to Pendleton or his self-absorbed characters. They’re too preoccupied with their acting lives to get real lives of their own.
To read a review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read Steve Cohen's review, click here.
DAN ROTTENBERG
Long ago and far away, two formidable giants of their time tried to revitalize their stalled careers by forging an alliance despite their mutual enmity. Could this be Hitler and Mussolini in A Perfect Day? Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen? Lincoln and Douglas in The Rivalry?
No, it’s Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier, collaborating on a 1960 production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.
The characters’ histrionic overacting, interrupting and mutual shushing notwithstanding, the fate of the planet— or even their careers or their personal lives— doesn’t exactly hang in the balance in Orson’s Shadow. But Austin Pendleton’s worshipful script refuses to confront this inconvenient truth as he plunges us yet again into another exercise in actors acting as actors obsessed with acting. These people and their spouses and friends (Vivien Leigh, Joan Plowright, Kenneth Tynan), Pendleton assumes, are famous names of the theater; therefore they must be interesting people whom we must care about. Isn’t that why we read gossip columns? Maybe; but on the basis of this exercise in theatrical navel-gazing, that point is not proven.
“Am I to be remembered for one movie that I directed from my high chair?” the Welles character asks plaintively at one point in Orson’s Shadow. To which I would reply: “If that one movie is Citizen Kane, the answer is ‘yes.’ And aren’t you glad you’ll be remembered for anything, long after most of us are forgotten? For that matter, aren’t you grateful you’ve lived in a free and prosperous society where your genius could flower, when most of the world’s potential geniuses of the past few millennia have been smothered?”
Of course such an answer doesn’t occur to Pendleton or his self-absorbed characters. They’re too preoccupied with their acting lives to get real lives of their own.
To read a review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read Steve Cohen's review, click here.
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