'War of the Worlds' to Capture the Stage on Friday

Mercury Theatre on the Air had just broadcast on October 30, 1938, a drama that, script adapter and actor Orson Welles told his listeners, was the company's "holiday offering" to them. It was, he said in closing the hour-long play, the cast's "radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying 'Boo!'"

With their realistic, East Coast-based version of the H.G. Wells novella "War of the Worlds," co-writer Howard Koch and the cast succeeded in scaring people well beyond what even Welles' fertile, 23-year-old imagination could have conceived. Thousands, who missed the play's introduction, panicked and swamped local newspapers, police, and radio stations in New York and New Jersey with phone calls and visits seeking information on the "invasion" and evacuation instructions. The next morning's New York Times called it "a wave of mass hysteria."

On Friday, Oct. 26, Mercury Theatre's history-making performance will be re-created and embellished by the SITI Company when it presents "War of the Worlds: The Radio Play" at 8 p.m. in Campbell Hall. The Saratoga International Theater Institute's play, written by Naomi Iizuka, salutes Welles' brilliance as well as his mischievousness as it captures the improvisational character of radio theater.

This rendition also looks at media manipulation of audiences concerned over a gathering threat of war and how something conceived as harmless fun can spiral out of control, observed Anne Bogart, artistic director and cofounder of SITI. Premiered in 1999, the ensemble's "War of the Worlds" was originally "meant to be done as a Halloween event at the West Bank Cafˇ in New York City," she said. "It worked so well we haven't been able to close it."

The "War of the Worlds" story of humanity confronting invaders from Mars has special resonance at UCSB where it is part of courses currently taught by professor Laurence Rickels, of Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic studies, and associate professor Anna Everett of film studies. The late English professor Frank McConnell, who edited the Oxford annotated edition of the novella, used it in his course on science fiction.

Bogart, who visited campus for a brief but intensive residency with the Dramatic Art Department, said in an interview that the UCSB venue is only the play's second staging since the Sept. 11 attacks. Earlier this month SITI presented it to audiences at Dartmouth College, "and they wouldn't leave" the after-performance discussions conducted by the cast, she said. "There is something very useful [in this play] for our times. It is not just a show but something that brings people together."

The award-winning director cannot yet pin down the reasons for this response. However, she suspects that part of it, at least, is that "we are undergoing an [emotional] onslaught from not only the horrifying terrorist attacks and our retaliation, but also from media overkill and manipulation of our feelings." Withdrawing from that ambience, if only briefly, may give people some necessary distance to regain a sense of control.

Bogart believes theater has a direct impact on audiences and demands participation, unlike the passive responses sought by film and television. Does this play perhaps encourage catharsis among attendees? she was asked. "Catharsis originally meant 'to shed light in dark places'," she responded. "We all have dark places in the soul that we need to place into the light, whether because we're scared, or in shock, or whatever it is."