Theatre
In 1936, Orson Welles and producer John Houseman earned a reputation for their inventive adaptation of William Shakespeare's Macbeth, set in Haiti and using an all African American cast. That production was followed by Welles's and Edwin Denby's adaption of Horse Eats Hat and, in 1937, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock. Breaking with the Federal Theatre Project in 1937, Welles and Houseman founded the Mercury Theatre and began with a groundbreaking adaption of Julius Caesar that evoked comparison to contemporary Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. They moved on to productions of The Shoemaker's Holiday, Heartbreak House, Too Much Johnson and Danton's Death in 1938. In 1939 Five Kings was produced along with The Green Goddess. The last theatrical production of the company was Native Son in 1941.
Read more about this topic: Mercury Theatre
Famous quotes containing the word theatre:
“If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinema ... has access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Mankind’s common instinct for reality ... has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life’s supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man’s frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“People fall out of windows, trees tumble down,
Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old
The air is full of children, statues, roofs
And snow. The theatre is spinning round,
Colliding with deaf-mute churches and optical trains.
The most massive sopranos are singing songs of scales.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)