Local actor Jay Tilley tests his skill in a biographical play about Orson Welles, playing weekends at The Lyceum through July 15. It is a solo performance — there are no other actors or actresses to help him out. The Lyceum is a recital room and not a theater, so there's no proscenium and no set of which to speak. It's just him, a chair and a desk, with the audience merely a few feet away.
In a well-paced hour and a half performance, Tilley creates the character of Welles and reminisces about the high points of his career while fighting via long distance telephone to avoid a major disaster.
Tilley makes an imposing Welles. He is young enough to be believable as the "wonder kid" of show business in the 1930s and 40s — the show is set in 1942 when Welles was 27.
By that time, Welles had achieved great things in three areas of entertainment. In theater, he had directed both a memorable "Macbeth" set in Haiti and the legendary premiere of Mark Blitztein's musical "The Cradle Will Rock." On radio he was the voice of "The Shadow" as well as the director of 1938's famous nation-scaring Halloween program "The War of the Worlds." In the movies he had already released what was to become known as one of the great films of the century, "Citizen Kane."
THE PLAY finds Welles in a hotel room in Rio de Janeiro where he is working on a documentary for the U.S. government, which wants help with the propaganda effort to keep Latin America from supporting the Nazi side of World War II.
While stuck working on that project, he battles by phone with the powers that be in Hollywood to prevent what he sees as damaging cuts to his new film, an adaptation of Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer Prize winning novel "The Magnificent Ambersons."
The script for the play is by Marcus Wolland, a Seattle-based writer and actor. As with many one-actor biographical plays, the playwright has had to strike a balance between creating a portrait of his subject as he was at a specific point in time and developing a biographical story of the subject's life. The result is often a series of "and then I wrote" type of speeches in which the subject relates the highlights of a notable career.
Wolland doesn't quite find the balance, and as a result, there is a slightly split-personality feel to the play itself. But it helps that Welles was notoriously self absorbed and would have had no difficulty at all expounding on his life and career at the drop of a hat.
FOR TILLEY, the task was to find a balance of his own: a balance between impersonation and acting; between simply seeming to be Orson Welles and letting the audience feel the pressure Welles must have felt being 6,300 miles from Hollywood — in the days when long distance calls had to be placed through operators and the text of messages had to be sent by telegram.
Tilley does a good job of finding that balance and keeping the audience's attention throughout the brief two act piece.
He's particularly good at a skill that escapes many actors, that of being able to talk on the telephone and convince the audience that he's actually carrying on a conversation with the person on the other end of the call when we can only hear one side of the discussion. With many actors, this results in awkward pauses or too-lengthy silences. With others, we get a catalogue of facial reactions that feels overblown. Tilley, on the other hand, carries on natural, if emotionally charged conversations as he battles to protect the film he thought he had finished before heading south to do his patriotic bit for the war effort.
It is, as bio-plays are supposed to be, a chance to get to know both the historical person involved and the highlights of the career that makes the topic interesting. In this case, add the pleasure of watching a young actor rise to the challenge of a real test of his performance skills.
Brad Hathaway reviews theater in Virginia, Washington and Maryland as well as Broadway, and edits Potomac Stages, a Web site covering theater in the region (www.PotomacStages.com). He can be reached at Brad@PotomacStages.com.