Word: lear
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Orson Welles is a genius. No-one can deny that he has the most imaginatively fertile mind in the theatre today. His results, especially when dealing with Shakspere, are always controversial, be it in the movies with Macbeth or on the stage with Lear. For Welles is never one to back down from a challenge...
...second night of Lear's run, Orson Welles was completely crippled. Having broken his left ankle just before the opening, he sprained the right one immediately after it. Despite poor notices, Manhattan's City Center was packed when the second-night curtain rang up and Welles was rolled out in a wheelchair, one foot encased in a plaster cast, the other swathed in bandages. At 40, and weighing 260 Ibs., the heavy-jowled "boy wonder'' no longer looked like a precocious cherub, but he quickly demonstrated that he had not lost his showmanship...
Announcing in his deep, effortless voice that Lear could not go on but that Welles would, he apologized for looking more like "the man who came to dinner" than a tormented monarch. He candidly confessed that since the City Center was a nonprofit, cultural organization that needed the money, he had "come out to discourage a stampede to the box office." Only a few hundred of an estimated 2,800 present asked for refunds. The rest settled back for An Evening with Orson Welles...
Welles vowed that he would play out the run of Lear, "if they have to swing me over the stage with wire." Then he agreed to an audience request that he tell the story of Lear, acting the King's part. He interrupted his little concert only once -to apologize for having made a mistake in the text. "I'm terribly nervous," he said, "but I know why I made that mistake." Then he said to someone in the first row center: "Please don't take pictures. That clicking noise sounds like the breaking of bones...
Welles finished the week playing Lear to a full house. He was dressed and made up for the part, but did it all from his wheelchair. The audience loved...