"Orson's Shadow," the Austin Pendleton play that opened Friday at Artists Repertory Theatre, comes a few minutes in, when Michael Mendelson, as the noted theater critic Kenneth Tynan, shoos off a young stagehand, then turns to address the audience directly.
excuse for exposition," he says. Whereupon he cheerfully launches into the exposition on his own, catching everyone up on the unfortunate state of his friend, the enviable career has become dilapidated.

playful device here, a first slice into the onion of a play about the rehearsals for a play, about dramatic realists struggling with absurdist modernism, about the encroachments of real life into the world of make-believe and vice versa.
As part of the playhouse setting, much is made of the curse of "Macbeth," deemed so unlucky that its name dare not be spoken inside a theater. The theatrical giants play," as they call the Shakespearean classic, but on "Rhinoceros," in which everyone but the hero turns into a rhino.

Even so, the enterprise does seem cursed: Not by theatrical superstition, or even by the fact that both director and leading man hate the play, but by the personal and professional baggage everyone involved drags along.
To simplify and summarize: Welles, the director, resents and envies Laurence Olivier, the leading man, who speaks frequently of his wife, Vivien Leigh, thereby irking his lover and co-star, the young actress Joan Plowright. But the two great men, each in decline yet still ambitious, need each other in a way that only Tynan, who reveres them both, understands.

In a sense, the play is a bout of ego boxing between Welles and Olivier, with Tynan serving as referee.
Actors playing actors, especially legendary ones, might be an excuse for serving up the ham, but the cast here strikes cut-down-to-size, between humor and psychological depth. Mendelson's chain-smoking, brandy-sipping Tynan is the smartest person in the room, unless Welles is around; yet Welles is the only one he confronts with confidence.

His timing, a tool of both wit and poignancy, is matched by the riveting Todd Van Voris, who portrays Welles as a combination of wounded bear and chastened schoolboy. If masquerading as civility.
gravity, but it's highly watchable shooting star is Susan Maginn, suitably beautiful and broken as Leigh.

She tries to maintain the glamorous front of a Hollywood star, discord, and when mania and loneliness get the better of her it's like a sudden splash of mercury across the stage.