Mercury Theatre Remembered

You know, there's been some talk here tonight about directors as though they were a separate breed, and I'm afraid I have to take exception to that. I believe that directors are all of them actors, just as I believe that most writers are actors.

There never was a community of people who got together and said, why don't we have a theater? We need a theater. Where are the actors? That never happened in the history of the world. A few hands got together and said, let's get up on the stage and do something.

In the cave, somebody stood up and told a story. Nobody said, let's have a story until they'd heard a story. Wilson Wells knew how to tell a story. I'm Leonard Malton, and this is a look at one of America's master storytellers.

Whether on the stage, on film or radio, Wells' great skill was to manipulate the medium in a way that seized the imagination of his audience. The Golden Age of Radio lasted some twenty years, but the radio broadcast of Orson Wells ranked among this century's most unique artistic achievements.

Richard Wilson, a member of the famed Mercury Company, recalls why radio was so special to Orson. There was a favorite medium of Orson's because he knew it knew no boundaries. It was a theatre of imagination.

He thought of it as a gathering of people in the town square just to hear a story. Orson Wells began his network radio career at 19. By age 23, he had simultaneously become one of radio's most accomplished performers and a top director on the Broadway stage.

In a single year, the first in the life of the Mercury Theater, Orson Wells has come to be the most famous name of our time in American drama. Says Collier's magazine, 23-year-old Orton Wells threw a bombshell into Broadway.