BRATTLEBORO — Now in its fourth year presenting special productions for Halloween, Shoot the Moon usually adapts a scary literary classic for the stage, such as Dracula or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
This year, however, the innovative theater company is instead performing an adaptation of a famous - or rather, infamous - work of science fiction.
For the next three weekends - on Fridays and Saturdays Oct. 20, 21, 27, and 28 and Nov. 3 and 4 - Shoot the Moon theater company presents Orson Welles's adaptation of H.G. Wells's classic 1897 novel The War of the Worlds at the Hooker-Dunham Theater in Brattleboro.
Initially performed by Welles on the CBS radio program The Mercury Theatre of the Air on Oct. 30, 1938, the broadcast of The War of the Worlds created a panic around the U.S. that night because some people thought it real.
Artistic Director Joshua Moyse thought that for this year it would be “fun” to do a live staged version of the radio play.
“We are turning our stage into a radio studio,” he says. “The words tell the story, which means you don't always have to stage what is being said, and that allows for greater directorial interpretation.”
Halloween Eve, 1938
In this recreation of a live radio broadcast like Welles' original, Shoot the Moon company members bring the audience into the CBS studio on Halloween Eve, 1938, where performers read the script, play the scene music, and execute the sound effects that panicked families gathered around their living room radios.
“Although we are not exactly presenting the radio play as a period piece, the actors will make the gesture to another era by wearing bow ties and suspenders,” Moyse said.
Directed by Moyse, The War of the Worlds has a cast of six men and one woman.
“I make up for so few women in the cast by making the one we do have play the lead, a professor from Princeton,” Moyse says.
The cast includes Elias Burgess, Sean Fitzharris, Josh Goldstein, Colin Grube, Jon Mack, Jon Ogorzalek, and Xoe Perra, along with stage manager Alistair Follansbee.
Patrick Parrinder writes in Learning from Other Worlds that H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds “has been both popular (having never been out of print) and influential, spawning half a dozen feature films, radio dramas, a record album, various comic book adaptations, a television series, and sequels or parallel stories by other authors. It has even influenced the work of scientists, notably Robert H. Goddard, who, inspired by the book, invented both the liquid fueled rocket and multistage rocket, which resulted in the Apollo 11 moon landing 71 years later.”
But, by far, the most famous adaption of the novel undoubtedly is Welles's version, and what made it so effective was his use of the then-new format of the live news broadcast.
Just a month earlier, radio listeners were riveted by live reports from Berlin, Prague, and other European capitals of what came to be known as the Munich Crisis, when the world feared that another world war would break out over German demands to annex part of Czechoslovakia into its territory.
It was the first time that an ongoing international news story was reported live on radio, as regular programming was frequently interrupted for the latest developments in the crisis.
'Varying levels of hysteria'
Moyse writes in a news release that, with the memories of the Munich Crisis fresh in peoples' minds, Welles's radio adaptation “created varying levels of hysteria.”
In part, it was because “many listeners who missed the disclaimers [at the start of the program] actually thought Martians were invading Earth, due to the simulated breaking news broadcast format created by director and narrator Welles, in collaboration with Howard Koch, who is credited with adapting the 19th century work of literature.”
Later critics suggest that the supposed panic seems to have been exaggerated by newspapers of the time seeking to discredit radio as a source of information, as Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow asserted in a 2013 Slate.com article titled “The Myth of the 'War of the Worlds' Panic.”
Moyse notes that much of the controversy around the production Welles and Koch created was driven by media criticism that its structure was intentionally deceptive, although Welles denied that was the intent.
Nevertheless, after the Welles broadcast, the broadcast networks prohibited using dramatized news bulletins on its entertainment programs.
“Welles contended that his motivating factors in adapting H. G. Wells' novel was to draw parallels with the rise of fascism in Europe,” Moyse says. “But another theme of his definitely was the power of fake media.”
Especially after Shoot the Moon's previous production, Trump's Fifth Avenue, which was based on actual words of our current President, Moyse has found himself recently musing over the implications of fake media.
“What is delicious about this War of the Worlds is that it is unequivocally fake,” he says. “A lot of people are talking about fake media these days. Let's have some non-debatable fake news.”
One suggestive manipulation of fake reality in Moyse's staging of this adaptation is the use of Orson Welles himself in the show.
“There is an interesting aspect where Welles who was the narrator actually plays himself, the famous director/actor,” Moyse says. “He has two monologues as himself in the radio play. At first, I was going to have an actor do his speeches, but that didn't seem quite right, or rather it didn't seem quite real enough.
“Then I decided on another approach,” he continues. “Welles was notoriously late for everything. So we decided to make Welles late for our broadcast and have him phone in his speeches. Using Welles's actual voice from the original broadcast recording, a cast member holds up a telephone to the microphone for his speeches.”
The real manipulates the imitation.
Adding tech
Moyse has long been interested in the intricacies of technologies, with which he has played around in all the Halloween productions. “For example, in Dracula we used cell phones, oddly out-of-synch with the period piece,” he says.
Moyse grew up familiar with Welles adaptation of The War of the Worlds, but doesn't believe that necessarily may be true for others today. “I think it would be interesting for younger audiences to hear the remarkable piece,” he says.
This War of the Worlds should suit that Halloween taste for terror with a few moments that Moyse says are deliciously scary.
“Yet it's hard to make live performances frightening as, say, movies can be,” he admits. “We do the best we can.” In all of Shoot the Moon's Halloween shows, Moyse has also employed humor and camp, thinking it better to embrace than ward off the implications of these over-the-top tales.
Many regular faces from other Shoot the Moon productions will be seen in this production.
“In fact, there is only one new actor, Jon Ogorzalek, who is wonderful by the way,” says Moyse. “The regulars of Shoot the Moon are working well as a group, and some of these players have performed in two or three productions straight.
“It is a little different working for Shoot the Moon rather than other small theater companies in the area. I am interested in exploring nontraditional theater. Often we begin with no script. We may have a book we are thinking of adapting or maybe a scene or two, but not a whole standard play. It takes a lot of guts from actors to join on to a project like that. They need to be open-minded, adventurous, and be willing to take risks.”
Even so, Moyse doesn't want Shoot the Moon to remain a closed and insulated theater company.
“For The War of the Worlds we actually held an open audition for a change,” he says. “This opened us up to new actors out there in the community. What's so exciting about open auditions is that you never know who will walk in. Bringing on board new talent is a way to navigate Shoot the Moon into the future, keeping us fresh, vital, and healthy as a theater company.”