By LESLIE WEISMAN
Richard France’s Obediently Yours, Orson Welles — which, as he wrote in his introduction to the published play (Oberon Books, 2011), was “being published and/or performed from Argentina to France, from Mexico to Germany, from Spain to India (in Hindi, yet!), from Belgium to the Balkans, from Poland to Japan, and now the U.K.” — is returning to the South Asian subcontinent next month.
It will be performed this time, not in Hindi, but in its (and, of course, Orson’s) original language, and in Auroville — a city which, whether by design or by chance, with regard to the play’s being staged there, seems to speak Welles’s language in other ways as well.
According to its handwritten charter (in French, no less, a language in which Welles was more or less comfortable), Auroville is a city that “belongs to humanity as a whole . . . the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages,” one seeking “to be the bridge between the past and the future.”
“Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within,” the charter continues, “Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations” — arguably, if coincidentally, speaking to Welles’s own such “discoveries,” their “realization,” no matter how brilliant their concept and how passionately he would “spring towards” them, in later years, as often thwarted or aborted as realized.
This latest production of Obediently Yours, Orson Welles will be directed by the Auroville Theatre Group’s Brooklyn-born director-playwright Jill Navarre, and feature Washington, D.C. performer-playwright-director Robert Michael Oliver as Welles.
It will open on August 9 and go on a short tour thereafter, France tells us, “including two performances at the (lovely) Jagriti Theatre in Bangalore.”
The Boston-born France is the author of The Theatre of Orson Welles and Orson Welles on Shakespeare.
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