Liliom

The campers of Campbell's room present the Campbell's Playhouse. Orson Welles producer. Good evening. This is Orson Welles. Tonight Miss Helen Hayes joins us again in the Campbell Playhouse. And our story is Lillium.

When Mollnarr wrote this incredibly beautiful and beautifully incredible little fantasy, it was at first received with a general bewilderment which I hope we won't revive tonight. They knew what to make of Lillium, which was a straight-faced account of a carnival man who stole a star out of the blue heavens and came back from the dead to give it to a child.

The piece was withdrawn, which seems understandable, and you wouldn't be hearing it now if it hadn't been tried again ten years later. This is a success story because the history of Lillium in every language is the story of a success.

I don't know what's happened to people since Lilliam's first and let's pray it's only failure. I don't know whether Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs would have broken all box office records in those cozy old days when security was the premise of human life and peace was a promise.

But I do know that if Pinker, though, were dying again in one of our theaters and Peter Tan were asking another audience if they believed in fairies, there would be the same majority of the affirmative.

And I do believe that as long as we can tolerate fiction, which is what didn't happen, we'll welcome fantasy, which is what doesn't. Fantasy is the highest reach of the mind. It is our first conclusion and our last.

A tall story was told after the first fire that was ever built. And we haven't outgrown magic, even if we know better. I am too far away from you for you to hear me, but you do.