In Citizen Kane, Orson Welles delivers a tantalizingly fragmented portrait of a great newspaper man. Playwright Mark Jenkins offers a similarly jagged portrait of Welles himself in the solo play Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles, starring Christian McKay as the legendary director and actor.
Theatregoers seeking a rigorous, detail-rich biodrama would be well advised to look elsewhere. Just as Jenkins never provides a firm context for this 90-minute reminiscence, he omits details and allows his subject to shift from subject to subject at will. Often there are leaps through time and references that go unexplained. The result is a theatrical collage of Welles: a play filled with wit, self-disparaging humor, and literary allusion, including some grand reworkings of Shakespearean passages.
Jenkins' approach works marvelously for the first two-thirds of the evening as Welles recounts his early theatrical and cinematic successes. As Welles' career takes a turn for the worse, however, Jenkins' approach to the biography becomes even more disjointed and cursory, leaving very little room for exploration of the internal and external forces that led, for instance, to Welles' struggles to bring works like Othello to the screen.
Theatregoers can almost forgive the shortcomings of Jenkins' work, however, because of McKay's superlative turn as the oversized (literally and figuratively) artist. McKay not only bears more than a passing resemblance to Welles, he possesses the man's rich and mellifluous voice. Early in Rosebud, McKay fills his performance with arrogance, sparkle, and extraordinary charisma, qualities that gradually fade as Welles himself becomes a 20th-century equivalent of one of his most famed roles, Shakespeare's obese, tragic clown Sir John Falstaff. Director Josh Richards stages McKay's physical transformation with grand theatricality, and though neither his flourishes here and elsewhere nor McKay's performance throughout disguise the play's unevenness, they ultimately combine to make Rosebud satisfying on many levels.
Presented by Atomic80 Productions as part of Brits Off Broadway
at 59E59 Theaters, 59 E. 59th St., NYC.
June 1–10. Tue.–Fri., 8:30 p.m.; Sat., 2:30 and 8:30 p.m.; Sun., 3:30 and 7:30 p.m.
(212) 279-4200 or www.ticketcentral.com.