Orson Welles, Vol I (96 page)

He was clearly happy to be in harness again, and exhilarated to be able to speak of Welles and himself as ‘we’. ‘In producing, we have always had one other basic rule,’ he went on, ‘ – that our only reason for doing a show is that we were crazy about it, and that we have felt that in its particular field it was
the best work we could produce with all our excitement, enthusiasm and resources, regardless of expediency, prudence or any other considerations. It is in this way that we have thought of
Native Son
.’ Of course Wright was persuaded. ‘Knowing what you and Welles have done in the past, I do believe you both could do a courageous job.’
⁴
In June of 1940 Houseman was able to telegram Welles that the
deal was closed; a $1,000 advance had secured the play for a year: ‘please inform our crippled and choleric partner stop’.
⁵
(‘Eagerly await latest scenes and
inspirations,’ he added; he was then still part of the writing team for
Citizen Kane
.) To Houseman’s regret, Wright had already agreed to collaborate with the playwright Paul Green should he ever choose to dramatise
Native Son
. Green was
a somewhat anomalous figure, a white writer from the South who had, with his first, highly successful play
In Abraham’s Bosom
, presented a sympathetic account of black aspirations; soft-edged though it was, it was considered something of a breakthrough in 1927. It was not this play, however, which had recommended him to Wright. In 1936, as a writer attached to Chicago’s Federal Negro Theatre,
Wright had arranged a staged reading of Green’s tough assault on the chain gangs,
A Hymn to the Rising Sun
; he had been impressed by its grim, poetic power, and its avoidance of stereotypes – more impressed than the black actors in Negro Theatre, who had refused to perform it. (‘This play is indecent. We don’t want to act in a play like this before the American public,’
⁶
one of the actors said.
‘I lived in the South and I never saw any chain gangs. We want a play that will make the American public love us.’) In approaching
Native Son
, however, Green was determined to lighten up Wright’s terrible vision of black life; he wanted to add humour and charm. Above all, he wanted to explain Bigger Thomas, to render him sympathetic. In his introduction to the novel, Wright had fiercely rejected
the white sympathy that his first book had provoked: ‘When the reviews of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
began to appear, I realised that I had made an awfully naive mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about.’ He had not repeated the mistake in
Native Son
.

Green, the senior partner of the playwriting team, managed to push him a
surprisingly long way in that direction as they worked on the adaptation. Wright went to stay with Green in North Carolina; the deep rift in their attitudes to the material was immediately revealed. Wright (the inventor of the phrase Black Power) saw Bigger Thomas’s act as positive; Green attempted, in Houseman’s words, ‘till the day of the play’s opening – through madness, reprieve, suicide, regeneration
and other “purging” and sublimating devices – to evade and dilute the dramatic conclusion with which Wright had consciously and deliberately ended a book in which he wanted his readers to face the horrible truth “without the consolation of tears.”’ Wright was strangely quiescent during the collaboration; the rough working draft they produced was too long, stuffed with unnecessary scenes;
the second version was shorter, but with a sentimentalised, hysterical ending. Houseman at first refused
to produce it as it stood; then decided (with Wright’s collusion) to do it, simply changing the ending back to Wright’s original text ‘on my authority as producer’
⁷
without telling Green. Wright (living in the legendary Brooklyn rooming house where W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Carson McCullers
and Gipsy Rose Lee also lodged) worked on the script for three weeks with Houseman; most of what they did was concerned with restoring as far as possible Wright’s words. Green’s structure (in which the action is framed by Bigger Thomas’s trial) was sound and theatrically effective; this they did not touch. This version of the play is what Houseman handed to Welles in Los Angeles.

‘I had set
my heart on directing this one,’ writes Houseman in
Run-Through
. ‘But I was anxious to end my theatrical association with Welles on a note of triumph and I felt that with the strong text of Wright’s book to support him, his direction of
Native Son
would be more dramatic than mine.’ Both of these latter points may have been true, but there was never, as Houseman’s letters to Wright make clear,
any question of anyone but Welles directing it. With no opening scheduled,
Citizen Kane
was still in limbo as Schaefer and RKO continued to consult lawyers; Welles was in a state of impotent desperation.
Native Son
was the safety valve he needed. He hurled himself at it with ferocious intensity. The entire production, from supper in Los Angeles to opening night on Broadway, took seven weeks to
achieve. The money was immediately raised from – in Houseman’s phrase – Welles’s Hollywood friends; a small group, but evidently well-heeled. Casting was rapidly accomplished: bringing Ray Collins, Paul Stewart and Everett Sloane with him from Hollywood, auditioning the younger white actors, he recruited most of the black actors in the company from the old Negro Project team, including in the make-or-break
role of Bigger Thomas, his Harlem Banquo, Canada Lee. James Morcom (presumably recovered from the nightmare of
Five Kings
) was enlisted to interpret Welles’s ideas about design, Jean Rosenthal to execute them and create the lighting plot. Vakhtangov! was put in charge of sound; as always, Welles’s aim was to integrate the work of all these departments into an overwhelming statement. Taking his
cue from the novel, he sought to create a swift-moving vision of urban hell.

Chicago is the location, ‘the fabulous city in which Bigger lived, an indescribable city, huge, roaring, dirty, noisy, raw, stark, brutal; a city of extremes: torrid summers and sub-zero winters, white people and black people, scabby poverty and gaudy luxury,
high idealism and hard cynicism! … a city whose black smoke
clouds shut out the sunshine for seven months of the year; a city in which, on a fine balmy May morning one can sniff the stench of the stockyards; a city where people have grown so used to gangs and murders and graft that they have honestly forgotten that government can have a pretence of decency!’
⁸
It was Welles’s city, too. ‘I want this show to be surrounded by brick,’
⁹
he told Jean Rosenthal.
‘Yellow brick.’ Morcom gave him a proscenium of brick. Inside it, the set was made up of seven little wagon stages with brick facings and brick returns which would open out to join the brick of the frame, thus varying its width. A movable header (also, of course, brick) would be raised or lowered to alter the height of the opening. The width varied from twenty-five foot to fourteen foot; the height
from seven and a half foot to twenty foot. The side walls were raked sharply to counter the serious sight-line problems created by this arrangement. Ceilings, writes Rosenthal, were ‘faked down in extreme perspective’. The depth of the stage was limited to a very shallow ten foot.

‘From the tiny, poverty-stricken interior of Bigger Thomas’s room, through the elevated “murder” bedroom, set
four foot above the stage level on a raked platform and back-lit through chiffon curtains, to the low brick prison wall,’
¹⁰
in Rosenthal’s words, ‘the Mercury scenery plays its sinister part.’ The varying aperture is as nakedly cinematic a device as can be imagined. The sets themselves (three of which were flown: the cellar, the warehouse and the prison) were filled with realistic detail; a new
approach for Welles in the theatre. He was baulked in his desire for a practical furnace onstage by the New York Fire Department, but at least he was able to have real cornflakes and canned peaches with milk for the breakfast consumed by the cast every night. The lighting, clean and sculpted, was none the less used to serve realistic purposes: Andrea Nouryeh describes the crack of morning sunlight
in the first scene; the street lights (shone through grillework in the theatre’s flies) to create the narrow back alleys of Chicago; eerie moonlight in Mary’s bedroom as she is smothered by Bigger.

Sound, in Welles’s conception, was as important as any of the scenic elements. His purpose was to unify the ten scenes of the play with an almost continuous sound plot; more than in any of his previous
theatre productions, he used in
Native Son
what he had learned from radio. Applying a musical technique of transformation, he would establish a sound at the end of a scene which, by the beginning of the next scene, had become something
else. Nouryeh cites the chiming of the clock at the end of the first courtroom sequence: during the brief blackout and scene change it transforms into the ringing
of an alarm clock; as the lights come up on the new scene, Bigger’s mother comes in and switches the alarm off. Here, as in many places, Welles takes his cue directly from the novel, whose very first word is
BRRRRRIIIIIIIIIINNG
! He also experimented (not altogether successfully, in the view of some critics) with the use of recurring sounds at moments of intensity, sonic leitmotivs, as it were.
The sound of the furnace in which Bigger burns the body of Mary Dalton reappeared frequently. Welles’s ambitions for the use of sound were often somewhat in advance of the equipment at his disposal. In
Julius Caesar
, he had had to abandon his efforts completely; in
Native Son
, with the inspired collaboration of Bill Alland, he came close to what he had wanted. This was not achieved without intense
work, as was the fluidity of the production, vital to his sense of the play. Like
Caesar
and
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
it was to be played without interval; unlike them, it was unremittingly sombre, and lasted nearly two hours. The speed of scene changes was crucial, achieved with the aid of no less than thirty-seven highly drilled stage-hands. The technical rehearsals continued, on one celebrated
occasion, over thirty-six unbroken hours. Time was desperately short, Welles did not have the facilities or crew of a major studio at his disposal, and many of his company, including his leading actor, were relatively inexperienced. He drove them all, actors and technicians, to the very brink; but the results justified the suffering. Welles was able to go further and quicker than usual because
he was not acting in the show himself.

Andrea Nouryeh has reconstructed elements of the physical production to give a vivid sense of its overall feel. The scene in which Bigger desperately pulls a gun on the young Marxist, Jan Erlone, ends with a blackout; the sound of the furnace suddenly stops. The outline of the Prosecutor from the first courtroom scene is darkly visible for a second, lit
from above. During the ensuing blackout, the audience hear a collage of sounds of wind, trains idling, pulling out and then stopping, finally a piece of tin banging on a roof. The lights come up on the abandoned warehouse where Bigger and his girlfriend Clara are hiding from the police. A neon sign blinks. Through a skylight, snow is seen to be falling. Sirens are heard. The neon light switches
off; a beacon flashes through the skylight. The skylight suddenly crashes down. Shots are fired, in which Clara is killed. Policemen advance; Bigger scurries across a ramp over the orchestra pit, and fires into the audience. He screams
his defiance, which is drowned by the sirens; the lights snap out. The lights come up again, and we’re in the courtroom. Like the Prologue (also set in the courtroom)
this scene is played against a yellow brick front cloth ‘in one’ on the apron of the stage; stairs lead down into orchestra pit. The witnesses sit with their backs to the audience, who become the jury, and are addressed directly by the lawyers. In the final scene, after judgement has been delivered, Bigger is left alone with his lawyer. In the production’s final, somewhat controversial, image,
he hurls himself at his cage, arms stretched out, as if crucified. The lighting, outlining his body, heightens the image. ‘I want the play to end,’
¹¹
Welles had written to Paul Green, ‘with Bigger Thomas behind the bars standing there with his arms reaching out and out, his hands clinging to the bars – yes, yes, the crucified one, crucified by the Jim Crow world in which he lived.’ Again, Welles
takes a cue from Wright’s words in the novel: ‘He ran to the steel door and caught the bars in his hands and shook them, as though trying to tear the steel from its concrete moorings,’ though the martyr imagery of Welles’s stage picture is arguably alien to the more humanistic purport of Wright’s philosophical outlook; it is an eerie reminiscence of John Brown in Welles’s boyish
Marching Song
: ‘with a shock we realise that the attitude is no longer that of triumph but of crucifixion!’ In working on the play, Welles’s habitual energy had a demonic quality to it, fuelled both by his deep and life-long loathing of racism and his impotent rage about what increasingly seemed to him to be the suppression of
Citizen Kane
.

Houseman describes him during this period as ‘overbearing but exciting
to work with’. They had occasional spats, but these were between manager and director, not between partners; there was no longer anything behind the rows, no struggle for power, no dream of mutual involvement. Houseman now knew better than to attempt to create a closeness that Welles refused. It was the last time he would say ‘we’ of the Mercury Theatre. Bill Alland describes Houseman and
Welles, in yet another word that more usually belongs to marital relations, as ‘estranged’ – adding that in his memoir ‘Houseman doesn’t quite reveal how shat on he was.’
¹²
It was an end of being shat on, and a return of dignity. Quietly, Houseman was becoming his own man. Before embarking on
Native Son
, he had directed a show for the Theatre Guild. It was a flop – a flop d’estime, but a flop
none the less, more noticeably so since it was Phillip Barry’s first show since
Philadelphia Story
, the theatre hit of the decade. The show (
Liberty Jones
) folded during the first weeks of rehearsals for
Native Son
after twelve performances on Broadway. It was still a
major production of some class and style; the fault was universally acknowledged to be in the play itself, not the production.
Houseman held his head high, undaunted, as he would previously have been, by witnessing the white heat of Welles’s creativity in action so soon after a personal failure.