Mercury Theatre

Mercury Theatre

Orson Welles at age 22 (1938), Broadway's youngest impresario
Formation	August 1937
Dissolved	1946
Type	Theatre group
Location	New York City
Artistic director(s)	Orson Welles
Notable members	Orson Welles William Alland Richard Baer Bea Benaderet Ray Collins Joseph Cotten George Coulouris Geraldine Fitzgerald Arlene Francis Martin Gabel John Hoysradt Whitford Kane Norman Lloyd Agnes Moorehead Vincent Price Erskine Sanford Stefan Schnabel Hiram Sherman Everett Sloane Paul Stewart Ruth Warrick Mary Wickes Richard Wilson

The Mercury Theatre was an independent repertory theatre company founded in New York City in 1937 by Orson Welles and producer John Houseman. The company produced theatrical presentations, radio programs and motion pictures. The Mercury also released promptbooks and phonographic recordings of four Shakespeare works for use in schools.

After a series of acclaimed Broadway productions, the Mercury Theatre progressed into its most popular incarnation as The Mercury Theatre on the Air. The radio series included one of the most notable and infamous radio broadcasts of all time, "The War of the Worlds", broadcast October 30, 1938. The Mercury Theatre on the Air produced live radio dramas in 1938–1940 and again briefly in 1946.

In addition to Welles, the Mercury players included Ray Collins, Joseph Cotten, George Coulouris, Martin Gabel, Norman Lloyd, Agnes Moorehead, Paul Stewart and Everett Sloane. Much of the troupe would later appear in Welles's films at RKO, particularly Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons.

Part of the Works Progress Administration, the Federal Theatre Project (1935–39) was a New Deal program to fund theatre and other live artistic performances and entertainment programs in the United States during the Great Depression. In 1935, John Houseman, director of the Negro Theatre Unit in New York, invited his recent collaborator, 20-year-old Orson Welles, to join the project. Their first production was an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Macbeth with an entirely African-American cast. It became known as the Voodoo Macbeth because Welles changed the setting to a mythical island suggesting the Haitian court of King Henri Christophe, with Haitian vodou fulfilling the rôle of Scottish witchcraft. The play opened April 14, 1936, at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem and was received rapturously.