“Let’s take a subject of great simplicity, some phase of life in this great country and make it screamingly funny to an amazed and happily unsettled world.” Orson Welles wrote to his schoolmaster and mentor, Roger Hill, in the summer of 1932. “Even as I write this an idea for a half-opera/half-revue pops on the horizon. A history of America in, let’s say, ten scenes! Discovery, Revolution, Pioneering, Abolition, Civil War, Suffrage, Prohibition, Bootlegging, Advertising, The Newspaper Business — Whoa! There’s an idea! The newspaper business as an operetta! A Front Page Gershwin only more so.” He was about 17 at the time. Let it never be said that the kid lacked for ambition. One supposes he thought it would be fun…to write an operetta…about a newspaper.
If the creative fervor and precocity here is not impressive enough, it should be noted that he wrote those words even as he was failing to sell an already-written theater piece that he and Hill had collaborated on, Marching Song, an abolition play about John Brown, one that fully acknowledges Brown’s fanaticism but also is pretty blunt in its position that extremism in defense of liberty is at most a minor vice. Last year Rowman and Littlefield published Marching Song in a splendid, illuminating edition edited by Todd Tarbox, who’s also responsible for the superb Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship In Three Acts.
I can’t recommend the book highly enough. The play itself is a fascinating piece of work, perhaps classifiable as juvenilia but marked by a passion and commitment that’s remarkable in an artist of any age. Welles was a special kind of humanist, one who knew that idealism without works is dead. Hence his portrayal of Brown. Hence his 1946 radio addresses on Isaac Woodard, Jr., which are reproduced in the copious and sensitive supporting materials buttressing the play at both ends of the volume.
What struck me most in the play, though, was the elaborate care with which Welles (with Hill) described the work’s characters. I don’t read many contemporary plays and it’s been a while since I looked into drama from the first half of the 20th century, but I’m not sure if I did that I’d come across anything much like the description, say, of Martha Evelyn Brown, the wife of one of John Brown’s sons, Oliver:
The front door in the parlor opens and Martha comes in. She’s a truly beautiful girl with gold-brown hair and serious baby-wide blue0grey eyes. She is childishly earnest, and erratic as a child in moods and emotions. There is something puckish and youthfully impish about her, but she lacks Annie’s mature sense of humor and perspective. Born in the shadow of tragedy, despite her breezy manner, she is a little girl trying to be grown up, trying to look and act like a wife, a woman of responsibilities. Her big questioning eyes mirror the wonder and bewilderment that is in her soul. In her passionate and undisciplined heart, she loves her husband, Oliver, deeply, almost wildly, but she also loves Edwin Cook and many others. There is something of the real mother, the essential mother impulse, beating in that little child heart of hers. Now, she is loaded with parcels. She kicks the door shut.
Welles’ own earnestness, while not quite childlike, is kind of charming in the writing here. Whatever made him more hard-nosed (and it could well have been Herman Mankiewicz himself to an extent), a balance of cynicism and lyricism not evidenced in this early drama was clearly useful for Kane.
Another feature that impresses is Welles’ already spectacular grasp of stagecraft. The book includes a number of sketches he made for a potential production of the play, one of which I reproduce below:
Tarbox’s biographical preface, the copious Epilogue, and Simon Callow’s brief but definitely not-phoned-in introduction round the book out. Like A Friendship In Three Acts, it’s absolutely essential Wellesiana.
