Richard Barr: The Playwright's Producer

2. Playing with Martians: Stage and Screen with Orson Welles

12 2 Playing with Martians Stage and Screen with Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre R ichard Barr was twenty years old when he graduated from Princeton in 1938. Because he was without a job or a source of income, he decided to apply to four different institutional theatres, hoping for some form of employment or internship. He first sought out the Cornell-McClintic organization, which was founded by Katharine Cornell. Barr met with her husband, the imaginative director Guthrie McClintic, who, Barr notes, was “polite, questioned me in depth, and wished me luck.”1 Later, McClintic became his mentor, and he refers to McClintic’s directing and casting techniques frequently throughout his unpublished memoirs. Nothing, however, came through after this initial interview. The Cornell-McClintic organization was a traditional Broadway operation working with seasoned professionals. Barr was better suited for an organization geared toward neophytes and visionaries. Richard continued his search with the Playwrights Producing Company and interviewed with playwright Elmer Rice, who was managing this new operation. Rice, a well-known American expressionist, was an interesting choice for Barr, who later made his career presenting exper­ imental playwrights. But Rice was “equally polite and non-committal.”2 Barr waited many more years before becoming associated with a playwrights ’ theatre. 13 Playing with Martians He then auditioned for Maurice Evans’s company. Evans was already a major star, having brought his production of Richard II to Broadway. Barr auditioned as Shakespeare’s Falstaff at the National Theatre (now the Nederlander ) for Margaret Webster, the company director: “Since . . . I was an expert in all the classics, I chose the most likely for a twenty-one-year old.” After he performed Falstaff’s “sack” speech from Henry IV, Part II, Webster merely thanked him “and did not, to my knowledge, laugh aloud.”3 Again, nothing came of the audition, and certainly no promise of a job. By this time, Barr had reached the end of his possibilities and the summer itself, so his final audition was with the Mercury Theatre, the hot new company on Broadway in 1938 under the brilliant enfant terrible Orson Welles and Welles’s equally gifted coproducer John Houseman. It was a smart choice for the young Barr. Welles was very similar to him in temperament and style and not much older. And it was a fortuitous moment to join the Mercury family. The theatre’s first year had brought innovative productions of Julius Caesar and Doctor Faustus (which Richard had seen). It was also on the radio with its first successful season of Mercury Theatre on the Air, starting with its radio adaptation of Dracula in July 1938. Richard had already written to Houseman while still a Princeton student about his great success as Falstaff. Houseman, perhaps genuinely intrigued by the production (since Welles mentioned that he had heard of it), agreed to an interview. Barr felt that Houseman was the organizational backbone of the Mercury operation, though Welles’s creative force spilled into every decision. When Houseman finally left, after the failure of Welles’s 1939 film project, Heart of Darkness, the Mercury Theatre “fell apart.”4 Houseman confirms in his memoir that a Richard “Baer” and Howard Teichmann from Wisconsin were brought in as apprentices to replace female apprentices returning to collegeandlaterassumed“positionsofimportanceintheMercuryhierarchy.”5 For his interview, Richard was ushered into a makeshift space in the back of the theatre, where under “a small light” he met with Houseman in a small chaotic office, “scarcely large enough for a desk, and even in those days, Jack was a big man.”6 Barr’s actual interview with John Houseman was perfunctory. Houseman “posed the conventional questions” and “was his most polite self.” Richard explained that he wanted to be like Welles, an auteur director who reinterpreted and reassembled scripts to fit his own acting abilities. At this rather outrageous declaration, Houseman then suggested “that a bit of experience and training would be helpful.” To this, Barr, realizing that perhaps he had gone too far, noted to Houseman that he “wasn’t too concerned about salary.”7 This lack of concern was key to his securing a position with the Mercury. 14 Playing with Martians The Mercury Theatre was already beginning the steep financial decline that would end with the disastrous production of Five Kings. Having been heralded the “boy wonder of Broadway,” Welles had seriously overreached with the production of William Gillette’s...