The magazine article is at least a few years old by now, and at least one of the names it mentions might not be entirely accurate, but in spite of its seeming insignificance, it gives a glimpse of things that could come, in the sense that past often serves as prologue ...

Welles & Cotten: The Friendship at the Center of Their Storms

By Bernice Teschmacher, high school intern to The Stranger

Ever since the Pacific Northwest reduced "alternative" and "independent" to genres of music and film, respectively, in the early 1990s, it's become almost impossible to find homegrown artwork or storytelling that hasn't been weighed down with the deliberate dullness of pretentious pseudo-realism.

And of all the places where I thought I'd find drama that dared to reach beyond its grasp, I never imagined it'd be in high school student theater.

Welles & Cotten is a sparsely furnished, shotgun-paced, two-man stage play, written by and starring classmates Dean K. Fox and Martin Lillard, and perhaps the best compliment I can pay it is that its producers seem almost pathologically incapable of reining in either themselves or their production.

Within the space of barely more than half an hour(!), Fox and Lillard rush to condense the onscreen partnerships between filmmaker Orson Welles and his frequent collaborator, actor Joseph Cotten, into a single semi-coherent statement on the surprisingly stable relationship between these two men, both noted in retrospect for being more than occasionally overwhelmed by tempests that they themselves helped to bring about.

Ironically enough, Fox and Lillard manage to weave together an almost linear narrative, if you squint hard enough, from a crazy-quilt of excerpted exchanges - some signature scenes, others too-often overlooked - from Citizen Kane, Journey Into Fear and The Third Man.

Lillard connects credibly to Cotten, essaying him with a comfortable confidence as an easygoing everyman who exudes a slightly sleazy Southern-fried charm, but he's almost blown away by the bombast of Fox, whose possessed, in-the-moment rendition of Welles combines equal parts self-impressed caddish school lad, driven Promethean innovator and half-mad Zeus-like sky-tyrant.

In a way, it's almost more of a testament to the obvious offstage friendship of these two performers that their work ... well, works, and doesn't simply spin off into space, propelled by their mutually magnifying manic energy.

To say that the play as a whole could use some polish would be tremendously charitable, but the raw material is enough of a gem that it'd be worth the effort to polish, because unlike far too many tributes to "classic" storytelling, this piece actually seems to have something uniquely of its own that it wants to say, however much it might be struggling against itself to do so.

Whether you consider it a paean to creative talent or a metafictional chronicle of the bond between two men, it's a promising debut from Fox and Lillard, whose future works I'll be watching with interest.

Bernice started out at the Stranger? I would have thought her to be more of a Seattle Weekly sort of gal.

Intriguing. And Dean? REally?

Looking forward to seeing this reflected in the present...

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... Is not that much, with regard to this story, but let me see if I can offer my insights, and explain how that knowledge was intended to apply to these characters.

Before he was reduced to an obese old man hawking frozen peas and California wines, Welles was both a wunderkind and an enfant terrible, whose viable film career effectively began and ended with Citizen Kane, since it remains one of the greatest films in history, but it also made the mistake of taking aim at the most powerful man in media of that time.

Welles was light years ahead of his time (one of his ideas was a second-person film version of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, in which the camera would literally take the place of the story's "point of view" character), but he was also an incredible asshole, who could be propelled into abusive treatment of anyone in his orbit by even the slightest negative feedback or obstacles (a number of bad reviews for some of his plays inspired him to single-handedly do several thousand dollars' worth of damage to an entire hotel floor, where his actors were staying).

Cotten is an intriguing figure, not only because of how universally it's agreed, in retrospect, that he was woefully underappreciated in his time as a strong character actor, but also because he's one of the few people with whom Welles never seemed to have an infamous falling-out, which is all the more notable because, in at least two of Welles' films (Citizen Kane and The Third Man), he and Welles played estranged best friends, and in three films (The Magnificent Ambersons, Journey Into Fear and, again, The Third Man), the notoriously attention-whoring Welles basically ceded the spotlight to Cotten as the lead character.

I like Welles because he was so creative that, as near as I can tell, it literally drove him fucking nuts, and I like Cotten because, in many ways, he and Welles had what almost seems to me like an impossible friendship.

If it makes more sense to you, the two characters who staged this play wanted to follow it up with a similar retrospective on Jon Pertwee and Roger Delgado.

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