Review: Orson Welles’ ‘The War of the Worlds,’ (Re)staged Live at Barrymore Film Center, Fort Lee NJ

In a way, it was natural that Barrymore Film Center would follow the 1953 movie adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds with an even more unusual event: a live stage reading of the notorious 1938 radio broadcast that propelled its 23-year-old wunderkind director, Orson Welles, into the national consciousness.

Eighty-five years after radio listeners heard that Martians had landed in rural Grover’s Mill, NJ, would you believe it happened all over again in another part of the state Saturday night? Only this time it wasn’t millions of listeners unnerved, but a more select group of a few hundred attendees in suburban Fort Lee.

Over the years, several plausible reasons have been suggested for why the CBS broadcast became such a sensation, including an announcement at the start of the show noting that this was a dramatization of the Wells novel that was missed by listeners switching from another station, as well as the air of verisimilitude created by Welles through faux news reports on the invaders and the names of real New Jersey locations (instead of the British ones in Wells’ novel).

But, as I listened to the actors reading with gusto the original radio script by Howard Koch (who would secure even greater fame in a few years with his work on the movie Casablanca), I couldn’t help feeling that Welles had tapped into contemporary fears to an extent that he and his Mercury Theater company of actors didn’t remotely anticipate.

Director Ray Faiola, assuming Welles’ original role in setting the stage for the terror, somberly intoned that “Business was better; the war scare was over”—clear references to America finally easing out of the Great Depression and to the false “peace in our time” proclaimed a month earlier by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain after appeasing Adolf Hitler at Munich.

Within a few short years, terror was coming not from a fictional War of the Worlds but an actual World War II, with devastation engulfing entire nations rather than simply patches of the Garden State.

At the same time, I felt my own sense of unease about the script’s application to human beings of our time unaware of what they were doing to the climate as I heard the lines, “With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space.”

Throughout, Faiola—a retired director of audience services for CBS, and currently appearing on the small screen in “The Secret Diary of an Exchange Student,” “Darcy,” and “Confession”—ably read Welles’ lines from decades ago, even as he monitored the effects from technical supervisor Eldric Etra.

 (An extra thrill of the proceedings was hearing once again the incidental music of composer Bernard Herrmann, who would go on to score Welles’ Citizen Kane and much of Alfred Hitchcock’s best work from the Fifties and Sixties.)

At the end of the show, after all the terror of the events he narrated, Faiola seemed particularly amused as he read Welles’ non-apology apology after CBS urged him to make a statement on the hullabaloo:

“Of course we are deeply shocked and deeply regretful about the results of last night’s broadcast. It came as rather a great surprise to us that the H. G. Welles classic—which is the original for many fantasies about invasions by mythical monsters from the planet Mars—I was extremely surprised to learn that a story which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding novels and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate and profound effect on radio listeners.

Faiola and the quartet of actors with him onstage—Sean Marrinan, Wayne Pyle, Craig Marin and Kevin Miller—have had considerable experience with bringing back to life the world of radio drama, as they have been longtime participants in Halloween “Terror at the Mike” thriller series that have been staged in Ellenville, NY. The audience on Saturday night was the great beneficiary of their feeling and reverence for the medium.

It appears that this might have been the first time that the Barrymore—which opened a little over a year ago—has tried this kind of experiment. Judging from the healthy attendance and the appreciative response of the crowd, I wouldn’t be surprised if this kind of re-staged radio dramatization becomes an annual event—maybe even around Halloween again?

This Day in Entertainment History (Welles’ “War of the Worlds” Scares America Out of Its Wits)

October 30, 1938—It was just going to be a Halloween episode of the weekly Mercury Theatre broadcast, but instead the CBS radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds frightened the daylights out of a country already on edge—and made an overnight star of its 23-year-old director, Orson Welles.

Nearly 22 years later, in an interview with talk-show host David Frost, Welles identified the following factors as crucial in terrifying the audience—and convincing it that the outlandish events they were hearing about Martians landing in Grover Mills, N.J., were really happening:

* An FDR sound-alike who assured everybody there was no cause for alarm: “I think that’s when they really ran out on the streets.”
* A ham-radio voice trying to talk to others.
* An announcer who coughed, then suddenly stopped.
* The lengthy silence that followed this—and on a full network, no less.
* The faux amateur-radio operator returning to say now, “Isn’t anyone out there?”

You might remember the great scene in Woody Allen’s Radio Days when lovelorn Aunt Beau (played by Dianne Wiest) ends up with the true date from hell, when her boyfriend, hearing the Welles broadcast on his car radio, panics, runs out of the auto hysterically and leaves her out in the middle of nowhere. It doesn’t entirely exaggerate how America really reacted that night.

An estimated six million people heard the broadcast. At four separate points in the program—including the beginning—came a disclaimer that this was a dramatization.

But if you came in late—and heard only enough to persuade you that something weird was going on—or if you were a senior citizen who didn’t recognize Welles as the voice of the radio show The Shadow, you might have reacted as the following people did:

* The New England mother who packed her children and all the bread she could manage into her car, then drove away from her home.
* The listeners who hid in cellars, praying that the poison gas would pass over their homes.
* The college senior who broke every speeding record in existence to save his girlfriend. (What a guy!)

This was a radio audience, you must recall, that was hearing a daily drumbeat of worsening news from Europe. Only the month before, Adolf Hitler had gotten everything he’d wanted at Munich. In other words, it was a world ready for the notion that the worst could happen.

Several years ago, at a post-show discussion of The Man Who Came to Dinner at the Roundabout Theatre, I asked Kitty Carlisle Hart, the widow of one of the playwrights who collaborated on the comedy, Moss Hart, about her impressions of Orson Welles’ TV version of her husband’s classic. She groaned and related a tale of an ego run amok, including Welles’ penchant for imbibing so much wine at lunch breaks that most sequences filmed in the afternoon turned out to be useless.

It was a different Welles who updated H.G. Wells’ classic for a new generation. He was young, healthy, and not quite yet (though getting there) at the point where the principal screenwriter of Citizen Kane, Herman Mankiewicz, could later wisecrack, “There, but for the grace of God, goes God.”

(Mankiewicz had reason to be annoyed with Welles: Not content with being an actor-director-producer, Welles wanted sole screenwriting credit for Kane. I’d call it the greatest act of literary larceny I’ve ever heard of, but then I have to remember that this is Hollywood that we’re talking about.)

No, the Welles of Worlds still had the power to exercise his lifelong fascination with magic with authority untrammeled by studio interference or his own creatively self-destructive tendencies. The radio broadcast was nothing if not sleight of hand and misdirection used in a revolutionary new medium.

In that sense, a line of continuity runs from his early success to a final, unfinished project: a movie called The Magic Show, a kind of free-floating film essay in which Welles performed his own magic tricks, related the history of a famous magician, and reenacted a disastrous trick performed by another illusionist. It would have been his way of ending a career with the kind of razzle-dazzle that characterized its beginning.