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Stage

When the stars start to dim

A play about difficult times for luminaries like Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier still speaks to us today.

By JOHN FLEMING
Published March 1, 2007

Nancy Cole counts herself as fortunate for having seen Laurence Olivier onstage while she was in London in 1968. "He was in Strindberg's The Dance of Death, and I'll never forget it," Cole says. "I also saw his wife, Joan Plowright, in Much Ado About Nothing, and in many ways, it was the best Much Ado I've ever seen."

Now Cole is directing actors playing Olivier and Plowright in Orson's Shadow, the play by Austin Pendleton that opens tonight at Gorilla Theatre. The dramatis personae also includes three more theatrical luminaries, Orson Welles, Vivien Leigh and critic Kenneth Tynan. The setting is 1960, when Welles directed a West End production of Ionesco's Rhinoceros with Olivier and Plowright in the cast and Leigh then married to Olivier and Tynan in the wings.

But don't go to Pendleton's play expecting caricatures of the stars. "One thing I like very much is that it doesn't call for posterboard impersonations of those figures," Cole says. "I think that if one went to this play looking for that, it would be all wrong. It's not a Laurence Olivier lookalike contest.

"Still, what a trip for an actor to do Orson Welles or Laurence Olivier."

The Gorilla cast includes Steve Garland as Olivier, James W. Wicker as Welles, Tim Seib as Tynan, Emilia Sargent as Leigh and Caitlin McDonald as Plowright. Andrew Hughey plays Sean, a fictional character.

Critics praised Orson's Shadow when it played New York in 2005. "It is the best play about the dark midnight of the artistic soul in a generation," Robert Simonson wrote.

"I have the greatest respect for this play," says Cole, who saw the production at New York's Barrow Street Theatre. "It functions dramatically in a fascinating way. It is sort of Chekhovian."

Pendleton is the author of two other plays, Booth and Uncle Bob, and has taught playwriting at the summertime Broadway Theatre Project in Tampa. He is best known as an actor, with a long list of movie credits ranging from What's Up, Doc? to The Muppet Movie. He worked with Welles in the film version of Catch-22, playing his son-in-law.

When Orson's Shadow takes place, Welles' career was in steep decline from the heights he had achieved with Citizen Kane. Olivier, fresh off his stage triumph as vaudevillian Archie Rice in The Entertainer, had just taken up with Plowright and was finally making the break from his troubled marriage to Leigh.

"At some level this is a play that debates film and stage and the struggle that was going on in the minds in performers between those two vehicles," Cole says. "Shakespeare on film is almost one of the side themes. The films of Macbeth come up. It's about the interplay of these personalities and what it takes to get films made and what happens when the studio establishment turns against you."

Cole, who has also directed Talking Heads, Copenhagen and Shirley Valentine at Gorilla, finds much that is relevant in Pendleton's play on notables from an earlier time.

"This is also about the price of celebrity," she says. "What does it cost the people? I was just looking at the poor chick who shaved her head, Britney Spears. God, she's paying a price. And that's in this play too."

John Fleming can be reached at (727) 893-8716 or fleming@sptimes.com.

Preview

Orson's Shadow

The play by Austin Pendleton opens tonight and runs through March 18 at Gorilla Theatre, 4419 N Hubert Ave., Tampa. $15-$25. (813) 879-2914; www.gorillatheatre.com.

[Last modified February 28, 2007, 09:59:15]