Noted playwright and Welles scholar Richard France will be staging his play, Obediently Yours, Orson Welles, in Tbilisi, Georgia, this spring. It is the play’s fourteenth foreign-language production.
Current plans call for Obediently Yours to run from late May through early June at the Serrate Verde Festival in the Georgian capital, according to Georgian film director Mikheil Mrevlishvili.
The two-act play takes place on May 7, 1985, the day after Welles’ 70th and last birthday. From the play’s introduction: “The setting is a dingy recording studio in Hollywood. A shell of his former self, Welles is hoping that Steven Spielberg will restore his long-faded career by under-writing the final edit of his unfinished masterpiece, Don Quixote. (‘Il mio bambino’ as Welles called it.) While waiting for his assistant to arrive with the money, Welles does voice-overs and reminisces about his illustrious past. Finally, he learns that Spielberg has declined to help his ‘idol,”’ thus ending any chance of a come-back. Lending his once-incomparable voice to other peoples’ products, in surroundings like these, is his only future.”
France also will plant a tree in the Tonino Guerra Valley of Forgotten Fruits in the Tbilisi Botanical Garden in the city’s center in Welles’ honor.
The Boston-born France is known for his expertise on Welles’ stage work. He is the author of The Theatre of Orson Welles and Orson Welles on Shakespeare. He can be seen in new Danny Wu documentary American: An Odyssey to 1947.
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