Seventeen

[Obssessed_with_Orson]

i listened to this on the mercury theater on the air website.
orson is good in the lead but whiny
check out how joseph cotton voices the part of "Genesis", the black family servant

bye now!

[Jeff Wilson]

Here's the Wikipedia writeup on Booth Tarkington's 1916 novel. Nice picture of the 22-year-old Ruth Gordon, probably the first one to play the "Baby talk" girl, Lola, on the stage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeen ... ton_novel)
This was one of three Tarkington adaptations that Welles did for radio, the other two being Clarence and of course, The Magnificent Ambersons

[Le Chiffre]

Very funny book. My mom read it when she was a kid back in the 30s and loved to imitate the Baby talk girl. And yes, Cotten voices the servant in a kind of audio equivalent of blackface; call it black voice. I doubt any white guy could get away with that nowadays.

The book concludes with a Maeterlinck-inspired flash-forward, showing that William has indeed survived the trials of adolescence.
F.S.Fitzgerald has mentioned "Seventeen" in his personal "10 best books" he ever read list as "The funniest book I’ve ever read".

Maeterlinck? One of the leaders of the symbolist movement in late 19th-century Europe? That's interesting, although I'm not exactly sure how.

[Johnny Dale]

Welles was most persuasive playing powerful men — like Brutus, become sere and weary trying to rationalize ambition as idealism — or ancient ones. His centuries-old Count Dracula has the sepulchral poignancy of a majestic senior citizen doomed to play the vampire yet determined to play it to the hilt. And Welles sounds hokiest, and farthest from his own prodigious, wandering youth, when imitating the thin, whiny timbre of small-town America's young men in such period pieces as "I'm a Fool," "Seventeen," "Ah, Wilderness!" and "The Magnificent Ambersons."

[Wellesnet]

Now available in good sound at the IU Welles radio site:
https://orsonwelles.indiana.edu/items/show/1970