Wellesian Theater on Radio on Stage

War, both real and made up – as well as the battle between the sexes and the standoff between truth and fiction – runs through season-opening productions from the two major theater companies in town. To launch the season with a bang, Ensemble Theatre presents War of The Worlds: The Panic Broadcast while SBCC Theatre Group takes on George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man. 

It may be hard to imagine in 2025, but in 1938 The Mercury Theatre radio broadcast dramatizing H.G. Wells’ novel about a Martian invasion was taken too much to heart by its startled listeners. Though the radio play was pointedly preceded by an announcement that what followed would be a dramatization, many listeners who tuned in failed to get that introductory memo and mistook the broadcast for a live report. Panic ensued as on-air music programming was “interrupted” by “news” of aliens attacking Grovers Mill, New Jersey. The degree of the public’s hysteria at the time is still debated today, but listeners did overwhelm telephone lines and there was a measure of traffic congestion as folks fled en masse the villainous Martians the radio assured them had landed. In the days that followed, CBS Radio Network and Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre on the Air were browbeaten by an outraged media community.

War of The Worlds: The Panic Broadcast comes from playwright Joe Landry, author of It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play that performed several years ago at Ensemble. Just as in that work, the audience gets to see the play performed “live” on the radio, the cast not striding around a stage but dramatically reading into microphones, the sound effects produced in real time (foley) as the play progresses and the audience sees the working of the production laid bare. ETC’s version, as directed by Jamie Torcellini – who most recently helmed the company’s productions of Dracula: A Comedy of Terror and The 39 Steps – takes place in 1948, ostensibly as a special 10th anniversary re-creation, and features another set: the site of the imagined Martian invasion in New Jersey.

“We leave the radio station and go to the Martian landing, and then go back and forth from the story to the studio,” explained Torcellini, who fashioned the scene changes in collaboration with the cast and with blessing from the author, Joe Landry. “Instead of having the actors just standing in front of a mic and reading from the script, we drop our scripts and they get into the characters they’re portraying on the radio. There’s an incredibly energetic flow that is exciting to watch. It’s really an interesting ride.”

The quartet of actors who take on the multi-leveled roles include Richard Baird, who played in ETC’s Measure for Measure among 50 other Shakespeare productions; Matthew Floyd Miller, who boasts several Broadway credits; Bryan Daniel Porter, who appeared in a recent L.A. revival of Reefer Madness; and Ashley Margaret Morton, whose touring credits include Legally Blonde and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Morton has previously been directed by Torcellini but is here making her ETC debut. 

“Putting this together has been a real communal experience,” Torcellini said. 

Meanwhile, while it might seem far-fetched that WOTW ever scared people so badly almost 90 years ago, given today’s technological innovations like mobile phones and AI-assisted searches to check on veracity, consider that back then the original broadcast was on an entertainment station and was indeed interrupted several times by announcements that it was a radio play. 

So, as Torcellini suggested, the question isn’t how it could happen today, but rather how we wake up to the reality that we’re living an even more unimaginable nightmare every day with the misinformation campaigns not only on social media, but TV networks and straight out of Washington. 

Some of that is addressed in the current show’s epilogue, which the director and company updated to make even more current. 

“There’s a lot of things that have happened and a lot of lies being told that have created more mayhem, like the insurrection at the Capitol,” he said. “The play is entertaining throughout. But it makes you think at the end in the epilogue, which ends with FDR’s voice saying ‘There’s nothing to fear but fear itself.’” 

War of The Worlds: The Panic Broadcast launches Ensemble Theatre’s 2025-26 season titled “Truth and Illusion” at the New Vic Theatre October 11-26. Visit www.etcsb.org