By RAY KELLY
Just when you thought all of the Wellesian gold had been mined, Todd Tarbox tell us the previously unpublished Orson Welles play, Marching Song, will be released this summer, alongside a revealing look at the legendary director’s formative years.
In mid August, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group of Maryland will publish the 1932 drama, which recounts the life of abolitionist John Brown through multiple, sometimes contradictory recollections — a narrative framing device used nearly a decade later in Citizen Kane. Welles, then 17, wrote the play with an assist from his mentor and lifelong friend, Roger “Skipper” Hill, Tarbox’s maternal grandfather.
The forthcoming Marching Song: A Play, edited by Tarbox, was inspired by remarks his grandfather made to Welles less than two weeks before the late director’s death in October 1985. The comments — previously recalled in Tarbox’s Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts — occurred after Hill had located his own decades-old copy of Marching Song. “For my money it remains a compelling, if overly long, play. If that God-awful (silent film short) Hearts of Age … is worth saving, Marching Song, written two years earlier, should rate a Pulitzer. At least it’s worth publication.”
Wellesnet was given a sneak peek at the 200-page book, which includes a foreword by biographer Simon Callow.
A must-have for any serious Welles fan, Marching Song: A Play is bookended by two illuminating essays by Tarbox.
Putting the long-delayed publication of the play into context is The Gestation of Genius: Orson Welles, Roger Hill, and the Road to Marching Song. Over the course of 47 pages. Tarbox recounts Welles’ arrival and experiences at the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, illustrated with rare of photos of Welles at the school. He has generously included poetry penned by a 12-year-old Welles in 1927 and a few choice bits of artwork.
Tarbox also cites letters from Welles to Roger Hill and his wife Hortense written during the teen’s 1931 trip to Ireland. The missives include news of his successful audition for the role of Karl Alexaner in Jew Süss at the Gate Theatre in Dublin.
“There are two big parts in Jew Süss. One is the George Arliss title role and the other is the half Emil Jannings, half Douglas Fairbanks contrast to the Jew, Karl Alexander, and the Duke. I read the play, decided I had no chance as Süss, and though I scarcely dared dream of getting it, learned Karl Alexander. My first audition was a bitter failure. I read a scene and being terribly nervous and anxious to impress, I performed a kind of J Worthington Ham bit with all the tricks and resonance I could conjure up. The real climax to the whole thing is that Charles Margood — actor — press agent and assistant scene painter has left and I am hired in his place to fill the various departments in which he functioned! Step back John Barrymore, Gordon Craig, and John Clayton, your day has passed. A new glory glows in the East. I am a professional!!!”
In the exuberant letters, Orson includes a sketch of himself as Alexander in Jew Süss.
Tarbox has also included Welles’ heartfelt 1982 eulogy for Hortense Hill: “A semi-orphan with something close to a surplus of foster parents before I even went to Todd, I was, in my childhood, determined to rid myself of childhood, a condition I conceived to be a pestilential handicap. I counted Hortense — not as any kind of mother, but from the first as the very dearest kind of friend.”
The creation of Marching Song and Welles and Hill’s unsuccessful efforts to find backing for a New York production are fully explored using correspondence from Welles to Hill. (In 1950, Tarbox’s father and Hill son-in-law Hascy Tarbox, directed the world premiere of the play at the Woodstock Opera House.)
Tarbox eloquently makes the case in the book that “Marching Song was the first flowering of Welles’s liberal social consciousness — defending the defenseless, the oppressed, the forgotten — that remained in full bloom throughout his life.”
Welles’ progressive political activism — stage productions of “Voodoo” Macbeth and Native Son, the campaign to seek justice for blinded African-American veteran Isaac Woodard Jr. and more — are recounted in Tarbox’s revealing epilogue The Social Conscience of Orson Welles.
Like Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts, the forthcoming Marching Song: A Play will be devoured by those looking for insight into the mind of one of the most creative men of the 20th century.
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Marching Song: A Play can be pre-ordered online through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target and Rowman & Littlefield.
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