The Mercury Theatre was an independent repertory theatre company founded in New York City in 1937 by Orson Welles and producer John Houseman. The company produced theatrical presentations, radio programs and motion pictures. The Mercury also released promptbooks and phonographic recordings of four Shakespeare works for use in schools.
After a series of acclaimed Broadway productions, the Mercury Theatre progressed into its most popular incarnation as The Mercury Theatre on the Air. The radio series included one of the most notable and infamous radio broadcasts of all time, "The War of the Worlds", broadcast October 30, 1938. The Mercury Theatre on the Air produced live radio dramas in 1938–1940 and again briefly in 1946.
In addition to Welles, the Mercury players included Ray Collins, Joseph Cotten, George Coulouris, Martin Gabel, Norman Lloyd, Agnes Moorehead, Paul Stewart, and Everett Sloane. Much of the troupe would later appear in Welles's films at RKO, particularly Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons.
Theatre
Part of the Works Progress Administration, the Federal Theatre Project (1935–39) was a New Deal program to fund theatre and other live artistic performances and entertainment programs in the United States during the Great Depression. In 1935, John Houseman, director of the Negro Theatre Unit in New York, invited his recent collaborator, 20-year-old Orson Welles, to join the project. Their first production was an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Macbeth with an entirely African-American cast. It became known as the Voodoo Macbeth because Welles changed the setting to a mythical island suggesting the Haitian court of King Henri Christophe, with Haitian vodou fulfilling the rôle of Scottish witchcraft. The play opened April 14, 1936, at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem and was received rapturously.
That production was followed by an adaptation of the farce Horse Eats Hat and, in 1937, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Marc Blitzstein's socialist musical The Cradle Will Rock. The latter received much publicity when on the eve of its preview the theatre was padlocked by the WPA. Welles invited the waiting audience to walk several blocks to a neighboring theatre where the show was performed without sets or costumes. Blitzstein played a battered upright piano while the cast, barred from taking the stage by their union, sat in the audience and rose from their seats to sing and deliver their dialogue.
Welles and Houseman broke with the Federal Theatre Project in August 1937 and founded their own repertory company, which they called the Mercury Theatre. The name was inspired by the title of the iconoclastic magazine, The American Mercury.Brady, Frank, Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1989
"All the Mercury offerings bore the credit line, 'Production by Orson Welles,'" wrote critic Richard France, "implying that he functioned not only as the director, but as designer, dramatist, and, most often, principal actor as well. To be sure, this generated a good bit of resentment among his collaborators (the designers, in particular). However, in a more profound sense, that credit is, in fact, the only accurate description of a Welles production. The concepts that animated each of them originated with him and, moreover, were executed in such a way as to be subject to his absolute control."
Welles and Houseman secured the Comedy Theatre, a 687-seat Broadway theatre at 110 West 41st Street in New York City, and reopened it as the Mercury Theatre. It was the venue for virtually all their productions from November 1937 through November 1938.
Caesar (1937–38)
The Mercury Theatre began with a groundbreaking, critically acclaimed adaption of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar that evoked comparison to contemporary Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. It premiered on Broadway on November 11, 1937.Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Welles's Career: A Chronology", in Jonathan Rosenbaum (ed.), Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This is Orson Welles. New York: Da Capo Press, 1992 [rev. 1998 ed.]
The production moved from the Mercury Theatre to the larger National Theatre on January 24, 1938. It ran through May 28, 1938, for a total of 157 performances.
In addition to Welles (who played Brutus), the cast included Joseph Holland (Julius Caesar), George Coulouris (Marcus Antonius), Joseph Cotten (Publius), Martin Gabel (Cassius), Hiram Sherman (Casca), John A. Willard (Trebonius), Grover Burgess (Ligarius), John Hoysradt (Decius Brutus), Stefan Schnabel (Metellus Cimber), Elliott Reid (Cinna), William Mowry (Flavius), William Alland (Marullus), George Duthie (Artemidorus), Norman Lloyd (Cinna, the poet), Arthur Anderson (Lucius), Evelyn Allen (Calpurnia, wife to Caesar), Muriel Brassler (Portia, wife to Brutus), and John Berry (extra). At the National Theatre, Polly Rowles took the role of Calpurnia and Alice Frost played Portia.The Playbill for the National Theatre production beginning Monday, March 14, 1938 (pp. 16–17)
From January 20, 1938, a roadshow version of Caesar with a different cast toured the United States. The company included Tom Powers as Brutus, and Edmond O'Brien as Marc Antony.
The Shoemaker's Holiday (1938)
The Mercury Theatre's second production was a staging of Thomas Dekker's Elizabethan comedy The Shoemaker's Holiday, which attracted "unanimous raves again". It premiered on January 1, 1938, and ran to 64 performances in repertory with Caesar, until April 1. It then moved to the National Theatre through April 28.
Heartbreak House (1938)
The first season of the Mercury Theatre concluded with George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House, which again attracted strong reviews. It premiered April 29, 1938, at the Mercury Theatre and ran for six weeks, closing June 11. Shaw insisted that none of the text be altered or cut, resulting in a longer and more conventional production that limited Welles's creative expression. It was chosen to demonstrate that the Mercury's style did not depend upon extensive revision and elaborate staging.Wood, Bret, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1990
Geraldine Fitzgerald, a fellow member of the Gate Theatre company while Welles was in Dublin, was brought over from Ireland for her American debut as Ellie Dunn. Welles played the octogenarian Captain Shotover. Other cast were Brenda Forbes (Nurse Guinness), Phyllis Joyce (Lady Utterword), Mady Christians (Hesione Hushabye), Erskine Sanford (Mazzini Dunn), Vincent Price (Hector Hushabye), John Hoysradt (Randall Utterword) and Eustace Wyatt (The Burglar)
Too Much Johnson (1938)
The fourth Mercury Theatre play was planned to be a staging of Too Much Johnson, an 1894 comedy by William Gillette. The production is now remembered for Welles's filmed sequences, one of his earliest films. There were to be three sequences: a 20-minute introduction, and 10-minute sequences transitioning into the second and third acts.Higham, Charles, Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985
The production was meant to be a summer show on Broadway in 1938, but technical problems (the Mercury Theatre in New York was not yet adequately equipped to project the film segments) meant that it had to be postponed. It was due to run in repertory with Danton's Death in the fall of 1938, but after that production suffered from numerous budgetary over-runs, a New York run of Too Much Johnson was abandoned altogether. The play ran for a two-week trial at the Stony Creek Summer Theatre, Stony Creek, Connecticut, from August 16, 1938, in a scaled-back version which never made use of the filmed sequences.
Long considered lost, the footage for Too Much Johnson was rediscovered in 2013.
Danton's Death (1938)
A production of Georg Büchner 1835 play Danton's Death, about the French Revolution, was the next Mercury stage production. It opened on November 2, 1938, but met with limited success and only ran to 21 performances, closing November 19. The commercial failure of this play forced the Mercury to significantly scale back on the number of plays planned for their 1938–39 season. Danton's Death was the last Mercury production at the Mercury Theatre, which had been leased until 1942. The company relinquished the theatre in June 1939.
Five Kings (Part One) (1939)
The final full-length Mercury production before the troupe headed to Hollywood in 1939 was Five Kings (Part One). This was an entirely original play by Welles about Sir John Falstaff, which was created by mixing and re-arranging dialogue from five different Shakespeare plays (primarily taken from Henry IV, Part I, Henry IV, Part II, and Henry V, but also using elements of Richard II and The Merry Wives of Windsor), to form a wholly new narrative. It opened on February 27, 1939, at the Colonial Theatre, Boston, in a five-hour version playing from 8pm to 1am. As the title suggests, the play was intended to be the first of a two-part production, but although it opened in three other cities, poor box-office receipts meant that plan had to be abandoned, and Five Kings (Part One) never played in New York, while Five Kings (Part Two) was never produced at all.
Five Kings was an intensely personal project for Welles, who would revive a substantially rewritten version of the play (retitled Chimes at Midnight) in Belfast and Dublin in 1960, and would eventually make a film of it, which he came to regard as his favourite of his own films.
The Green Goddess (1939) In July and August 1939, after having signed a contract with the RKO film studio, the Mercury Theatre toured the RKO Vaudeville Theatre circuit with an abbreviated, twenty-minute production of the William Archer melodrama The Green Goddess, five minutes of which took the form of a film insert. The show was performed as often as four times a day.
Native Son (1941)
The Mercury Theatre had moved to Hollywood late in 1939, after Welles signed a film contract which would eventually result in his debut, Citizen Kane, in 1941. In the intervening period, the troupe focused on their radio show, which had begun in 1938 and continued until March 1940. Their last full play after moving to Hollywood was a stage adaptation of Richard Wright's anti-racism novel Native Son. It opened at the St. James's Theatre, New York, on March 24, 1941 (just a month before Citizen Kane premiered), and received excellent reviews, running to 114 performances. This was the final Mercury production which Welles and Houseman collaborated upon.
"The Mercury Theatre was killed by lack of funds and our subsequent move to Hollywood," Welles told friend and mentor Roger Hill in a conversation June 20, 1983. "All of the money I had made on radio was spent on the Mercury, but I didn't make enough money to finance the entire operation. Hollywood was really the only choice. … I think all acting companies have a lifespan. My partnership with John Houseman came to an end with the move to California. He became my employee, expensive and not particularly pleasant or productive. Our mutual discomfort led to his decamping California and returning to New York."Tarbox, Todd, Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts. Albany, Georgia: BearManor Media, 2013, .
The Mercury Wonder Show (1943)
Although the Mercury troupe technically dissolved either in 1941 (when Welles and Houseman parted) or 1942 (when the entire Mercury unit was sacked by RKO - see below), Welles produced and directed this morale-boosting variety show for US troops in 1943, featuring a number of Mercury actors including Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead. The show was based in a 2,000-seater tent on Cahuenga Boulevard, Hollywood, where it ran for a month from August 3, 1943, before touring nationwide.
Gallery
Radio The Mercury Theatre on the Air (1938)