When Orson met Larry: A tale about shadow of fame

WATERTOWN -- A play about Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier has a double trick to pull off. The first and more obvious one is to persuade us that we're really watching those famous actors. The second, trickier one is to make us forget the first trick entirely. Only then can we settle down and just watch the play.

Happily, the New Repertory Theatre production of "Orson's Shadow" succeeds on both counts. Steven Barkhimer and Tuck Milligan quickly establish themselves as Welles and Olivier, respectively, not so much by exact mimicry as by an assured sense of intonation, gesture, and presence. Then they draw us irresistibly into the deeper resonances of Austin Pendleton's fine, funny, and meditative play.

Those resonances have less to do with the fame of the characters than with what fame does to a person -- and, more broadly, with the shadows that our early dreams and accomplishments can cast on us all. We feel these shadows not just through Olivier and Welles, but through all the characters -- famous, less known, or downright fictional -- whom Pendleton brings together onstage.

Life, in fact, brought Welles and Olivier together for a 1960 production of Ionesco's "Rhinoceros" in London, at a moment when both men were at difficult points of transition: Welles was out of favor in Hollywood, and Olivier's marriage was falling apart. Pendleton takes that moment and runs with it, weaving the tensions and conflicts between director and actor into a larger story of artistic passion and corrosive self-doubt, of the way our lives unspool into something both richer and poorer than we once thought they might be.

It's not just the giants at center stage who embody these tensions. The actress Joan Plowright makes an appearance, too, as does the actress whom she is soon to replace in the role of Olivier's wife: poor Vivien Leigh, her career and life increasingly clouded by mental illness. The British critic Kenneth Tynan also figures heavily in the action, bringing his two friends together in hopes of advancing his own theatrical ambitions. (Though Tynan did know and work with both men, his involvement in "Rhinoceros" is Pendleton's invention.) And the one made-up character, a young gofer named Sean, has a few dark moments of his own.

The women are just as successful as the men at evoking their famous characters; Debra Wise brings a magnificent subtlety to Leigh's unraveling, and Helen McElwain is just perky enough as the bright young Plowright. If Jason Marr seems a little too fresh-faced for Tynan, he nevertheless captures the critic's unique blend of enthusiasm and acid. Adam Soule's Sean, though a smaller part, lends another note of brash youth to counterpoint the aging lions who no longer quite believe their own roars.

All of this Adam Zahler directs with a light hand, bringing out both the wit and the melancholy of Pendleton's beautifully written lines. Pendleton, best known as an actor and director, infuses his play with a deep love of theater -- and with a deep understanding of just how crazy theater people can be. Occasionally he lets a scene go on too long, as when Olivier is talking by phone with Leigh while Plowright and Tynan wait for him; we get the point -- the painful ways in which everyone is being pulled together and apart -- well before Sir Larry finally hangs up the phone.

Mostly, though, "Orson's Shadow" is expertly crafted and staged. It's also not only for people who love theater . With its quiet but inescapable reflections on the swift passage of time and the partial consolations of art, this is a work of art for anyone who has lived long enough to know that life is short.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.