Event

Orson's Shadow

Austin Pendleton, the veteran actor, turns playwright for this peek through the keyhole at an actual event: a 1960 London production of the absurdist comedy "Rhinoceros" that Welles was hired to direct and Olivier starred in with Joan Plowright. Around this slice of theater history, Pendleton creates his own juicy portrait of a moment in the lives of two famous men in middle age, each feeling enormous pressure to reinvent himself, to prove to press and public that he's still got "it." Plowright, soon to be Olivier's wife, is on hand, as is theater critic of the time, Kenneth Tynan. Vivien Leigh -- Olivier's first wife, immortalized on screen as Scarlett O'Hara -- makes an entrance. "Orson's Shadow" is most definitely a play for those who can never get enough of the jealousies and feuds and misadventures of the famous.