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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.
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