Dramatic anthology (1938 and 1946).
The Mercury Theater, wrote Time in a 1938 cover story, was "bounded north and south by hope, east and west by nerve." It was the culmination of an unlikely partnership between a controversial and noisy "boy wonder" of stage and radio and a former grain merchant who had indulged a passion for theater when the grain market collapsed.
One would become world-famous in his youth and would never again capture the magic of those days; the other would toil in obscurity, gaining fame as an actor in his 70s. Their time together was short and ended in acrimony. The peak of it was a scant three years, 1935-38, during which Orson Welles and John Houseman created some of the most startling and talked-about theater New York had seen in decades.
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