Alec Mouhibian

Below is the uncensored and more precise version of my Sun review of Lost Eden: The Magnificent Orson Welles, a play written by Marcus Wolland, which just finished its run in Alexandria, Va. A DVD of the original performance is carried by Netflix, so potential victims might find the review useful. It is, to quote drunken Joseph Cotten from Citizen Kane, my first thrust at dramatic crimitism. Excerpt:

Magic is an aptly recurring focus in the play. Not only was Welles a virtuoso magician, but cinema itself is the virtuoso magic act, at once true to and larger than life. As hocus pocus taken to the artistic power, it’s the one narrative medium in which style is substance. This is proven by every minute of Citizen Kane as well as the cash-register chings in The Stranger, the hall of mirrors scene in Lady from Shanghai, the opening shot and hotel fight sequence in Contact of a Less Than Moral Nature (released under the improved title, Touch of Evil), and ultimately by the enduring vitality of all the great character actors—Welles among them—whose captivating presence made Hollywood glisten in its golden age. From that list only Citizen Kane has any literary substance.

Orson Welles was himself a kind of one-man show, so it’s natural for a play about him to mimic the form. Marcus Wolland’s Lost Eden: The Magnificent Orson Welles, whose run at Zemfira Stage featured Jay Tilley as Welles, has also the benefit of being set in the dramatically crucial time and place of Rio de Janeiro, 1942—when Welles was filming an ill-fated documentary of South America as his self-proclaimed masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons, was meeting its own ill fate of studio revision and financial failure back in Hollywood. This interval proved to be the gallows for his career. This interval is where we find him, monologing about his past while intermittently phoning RKO from a hotel room.

In the beginning Tilley’s Welles mops sweat and explains to a studio exec on the other line that he’s working on his memoirs. Tilley then proceeds to read those memoirs to the audience.

A one-man stage depiction of Orson Welles cannot entertain without conveying the grotesquely spectacular persona that made Welles such a compelling character in even his silliest roles. Tilley would’ve been permitted to overact; Welles, after all, overlived—in every connotation of excess offered by the word “over.” But he can’t be excused for underacting. He spends the show sounding like a film professor who decided to stuff a few pillows in his pants and impersonate his subject on Halloween. The tone alters seamfully only to portray Welles’s temper with mechanical bursts of shouting, and then to portray his knowing mischief with Santa Clausian chuckles. Nor did it help suspend disbelief when it seemed as though Tilley had never before handled a deck of cards.

Despite seeming vocally capable of the resonant Wellesian baritone, Tilley never actualized the feat. His diction, often beginning in the gut, got lost somewhere between the nose and jowls before finally making it out. And he rushed through many a longer line like it was a bad neighborhood at night.

Lost Eden is thus difficult to assess. Whatever subtleties it might contain couldn’t survive the lackluster performance. Two common perspectives exist on its subject, the most popular one featuring him as Orson M. Welles—M for martyr, artistic genius left to bleed on the corporate crucifix of the studio system. The second one views the man’s tragic wounds as more self-inflicted. Wolland’s play, though certainly not meant to be produced in black-and-white, is largely consistent with the former.

Magic is an aptly recurring focus in the play. Not only was Welles a virtuoso magician, but cinema itself is the virtuoso magic act, at once true to and larger than life. As hocus pocus taken to the artistic power, it’s the one narrative medium in which style is substance. This is proven by every minute of Citizen Kane as well as the cash-register chings in The Stranger, the hall of mirrors scene in Lady from Shanghai, the opening shot and hotel fight sequence in Contact of a Less Than Moral Nature (released under the improved title, Touch of Evil), and ultimately by the enduring vitality of all the great character actors—Welles among them—whose captivating presence made Hollywood glisten in its golden age. From that list only Citizen Kane has any literary substance.

Lost Eden’s substance is in its suggestion that the true tragedy of Welles lay in his knowing an Eden of boundless potential and momentary artistic fulfillment—purportedly the filming of Ambersons—only to lose it as inevitably and faultlessly as one loses childhood.

That script may not need a master magician to save it from banality, but it could use at least a cardsharp.