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04/03/2019 07:00 AMWilliam Castle is best known as the director and producer of a series of B-horror films of the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s who upped his reputation in the late ‘60s as producer of the classic Rosemary’s Baby.
Orson Welles is best known as the wunderkind stage and film director-producer-writer-actor and film auteur of what is arguably the greatest film of all time, Citizen Kane.
But what both men had in common—master of middlebrow suspense and imperfect genius of the stage and screen—was a little summer theater in the hamlet of Stony Creek on 128 Thimble Island Road in Branford.
According to Castle’s autobiography, he was a 25-year-old in 1939 and hungry to make his mark in show business when he obtained Orson Welles’s telephone number and persuaded him to lease him the Stony Creek Theatre, which Welles used the previous summer to re-fashion a play by William Gillette. That production, Too Much Johnson, was supposed to have featured a mix of film and live performances but turned out to be a legendary disaster with the cinema aspects never making it to the production and audiences baffled by what was happening on stage.
From these sketchy details playwright Joe Landy has fashioned a new play, The Wicked Stage, which will be presented as a kind of in-rehearsal performance at the Stony Creek Museum on Friday, April 5 at 7 p.m. and Saturday, April 6 at 2 and 7 p.m.
Proceeds will help in the restoration of the now-shuttered theater, which will be re-opened as the Legacy Theatre in the coming years.
The Stony Creek Theatre was originally built in the 1860s as a multi-denominational church. In 1914 it became a silent film theater, renamed the Lyric Theatre. A community theater group purchased the building in 1928 and renamed it the Stony Creek Theatre. In the ‘30s it offered summer entertainment until the ‘40s when it was transformed into a parachute factory.
In 1961, it became the Stony Creek Puppet House with the intention of becoming a permanent puppet museum for a collection of Sicilian puppets owned by Sebastiane Zappala. In 2009, the building shut its doors and now it awaits repairs, renovation, and return as an arts venue by Legacy Theatre, a non-profit group that purchased the building six years ago and is now fundraising for the restoration.
But some of its most lively days were the ‘30s when it ran as a summer theater. As Welles was exiting Connecticut to begin filming Citizen Kane in Hollywood, Castle arrived to take his flamboyant place in town.
Castle hired German actress Ellen Schwanneke to star in one of the summer shows, but when he learned that German-born actors could only appear in plays originally performed in Germany, Castle claimed he had hired her for the non-existent play Das ist nicht für Kinder (Not for Children). Castle then spent the following weekend writing the play and having it translated into German.
But that’s just part of the audacious character of Castle featured in the play.
“He was a real showman,” says Landry.
When representative from Nazi Germany sent Schwanneke an invitation to a Munich performance, Castle turned it into a personal request from Hitler to come back to Germany to perform for him. In a publicity stunt to help flagging box office sales, Castle promoted his star as “the girl who said ‘No’ to Hitler.”
Adding to the sensationalism, Castle allegedly secretly vandalized the theater, painting swastikas on the exterior. The publicity brought additional attention to the show, the star, and the theater. After the Stony Creek summer ended in 1939, Castle left for Hollywood to work for Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures.
“I first read the autobiography of [William Castle] in the ‘80s and became fascinated by the man,” says Landry.
Landry’s play—which he describes as a theatrically set comedy in the tradition of playwright Ken Ludwig—centers on Castle but also features a character based on Welles.
Landry says he loosely based the play on aspects of these two “larger than life figures” as the basis for this fictional-based-on-some-facts comedy. The hope is that eventually the play will be performed in the actual theater where it is set.
“I started writing the play about four years ago using the story of Welles and Castle—and the names are changes so I could use artistic license—as the starting point and then going off from there,” he says.
Castle’s faux German play and the publicity stunt he pulls, leading to a media circus, make it perfect material for a backstage comedy, says Landry.
For good measure, silent screen star Ramon Novarro also makes an appearance. (He was at the Stony Creek Inn in 1940, Landry discovered in his research, and so he decided to work him into the play, too.)
Castle died in 1977 at the age of 63. Welles died in 1985 at the age of 70.
Find out more by visiting www.legacytheatrect.org.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story provided an incorrect website for the Legacy Theatre.