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:
“The theatre is supremely fitted to say: “Behold! These things are.” Yet most dramatists employ it to say: “This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.””
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975)
“This visible world is wonderfully to be delighted in, and highly to be esteemed, because it is the theatre of God’s righteous Kingdom.”
—Thomas Traherne (1636–1674)
“Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)