Orson Welles and John Houseman
By MIKE TEAL
In the waning days of the summer of 1937, Orson Welles and John Houseman issued a proclamation in the Drama section of the New York Times about their plans for a new theater.
As Patrick McGilligan writes in Young Orson, “The partners promised to lead New York audiences on a ‘voyage of discovery’ with the new Mercury Theatre. The first production, Julius Caesar, would be ready sometime ‘early in November’.”
“We shall produce four or five plays each season”, the partners pledged. “The majority of these will be plays of the past – preferably those that have an emotional or factual bearing on contemporary life.”
They added, “Definitely we prefer not to fix our program rigidly too far ahead. New plays, new ideas may turn up any day.”
The Mercury Theatre would set its top ticket price at $2. (Broadway tickets often ran as high as $4.40).
After Welles and Houseman’s break with the Federal Theatre Project over the Cradle Will Rock controversy, the two men had gone their separate ways for a couple of months, with Houseman taking a teaching position and Welles attempting to get a production of King Lear off the ground with another producer, Arthur Hopkins.
As described in Young Orson, “In mid-August, Houseman stopped at Sneden’s Landing to pay his respects to the Welles’s. Orson was in low spirits that day, claims Houseman, because of the imminent cancellation of Lear. … Welles and Houseman stayed up late socializing, reviving their friendship and camaraderie.”
At the end of the night, according to Houseman, Orson was walking him to his car and then suddenly wheeled on him, saying, “Why the hell don’t we start a theater of our own?”
“Why don’t we?” agreed Houseman. They returned indoors, brimming with excitement. When their eyes strayed to a back issue of American Mercury, H.L. Mencken’s crusading literary monthly, they took the magazine’s name as the inspiration for their new organization: The Mercury Theatre.
“I did not go home that night or the next day or the day after that.” Houseman later recalled. “It was mid-August, and if we wanted our theater for the 1937-38 season we had not a moment to lose.”
Welles and Houseman continued to work together on stage and radio and into the making of Welles’ Hollywood debut in Citizen Kane.
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