The principal cast members of Citizen Kane were
not Hollywood actors. Rather, they were theatrically trained actors
Welles had assembled many years before with his partner and mentor,
John Houseman. In 1934,
when Welles and Houseman met, Houseman was thirty-three years old
and was already highly respected in the theatrical world as an actor,
director, and producer. Welles and Houseman produced plays together
through the Federal Theatre Project, a program formed under the
Works Project Administration (WPA) to provide employment in the
cultural arena. Their first project was a daring adaptation of Macbeth—they
used black actors and staged it as a voodoo-themed production. In 1937,
they both resigned from the Federal Theatre Project after one of
their plays, The Cradle Will Rock, was closed down
by federal agents because of its leftist politics.
Shortly thereafter, Welles and Houseman founded the Mercury Theatre.
The group consisted of many of the elite theater actors of that
time, and they were known as the Mercury Players. Eventually, the
Mercury Players included actors who went on to make a significant
impact in film, such as Joseph Cotten, Everett Sloane, Ruth Warrick,
and Agnes Moorehead. Welles and Houseman’s ambition for the Mercury
Theatre was to stage the classic plays “with their original speed
and violence,” as Houseman once said. Their first play, a modern
adaptation of Julius Caesar set against the backdrop of
Nazi Germany, was a great success. In 1938,
Welles, who had already been working very successfully in radio,
formed Mercury Theatre on the Air, a weekly radio broadcast starring
his Mercury Players. At this time, radio focused more on drama than
music, and the Mercury Players, with their theatrical talents, were
extraordinarily well-suited for the medium. Their most famous performance was
the 1938 Halloween
eve broadcast of War of the Worlds.
The Mercury Players soon moved beyond the limitations
of radio. Shortly after the War of the Worlds broadcast,
Welles accepted his Hollywood contract and moved west. At first,
he flew back to New York to do his weekly radio broadcasts, but
he eventually brought the Mercury Players to Los Angeles. Welles
and the Mercury Players continued with the weekly Mercury Theatre
on the Airradio broadcasts as Welles worked to
develop a project for RKO Studios. Welles was anxious to cast his
theatrical group in his first movie, but the length of time it was
taking for Welles to settle on a project took a financial toll on
the actors. Some had to take other jobs. A few got roles in other
films, which upset Welles—he’d wanted their debuts to be in his
film. The stress ultimately led to a blowup between Welles and Houseman,
and their partnership ended.
If the RKO executives had not signed away so much control
to Welles, the studio undoubtedly would have objected to Welles’s
plan to cast his Mercury Players in the key roles in Citizen
Kane. Then, as now, the idea of casting unknowns in a major
picture met a great deal of resistance. In fact, Welles maintained
that the reason an earlier project he had been developing never
got off the ground was that the studio was unwilling to let him
cast Lucille Ball, who at that point had never starred in a major
picture. In Citizen Kane, however, Welles was able
to cast his unknown Mercury Players, and much of the success of
the film stems from how well their theatrical training worked within
the dramatic framework of the movie. The fact that they were unknowns
actually may have contributed to their effectiveness, since more
recognizable players may have distracted viewers from the story.
