The War of the Worlds

The world in 1938 must have seemed eerily similar to the world today in 2022. Every historical age has its “given circumstances.” During both time periods, the world was in a rapid state of flux. We had just been through the “Great War” (now known as World War I), which resulted in violence and death on a scale never seen before. This bloodshed was the debt collected after a century of the rapid expansion of colonial empires during the 19th century. In 1938, the United States was on the brink of what would become the second “Great War” (World War II), with German tanks rolling into Poland in September of 1939, less than a year after the broadcast of the radio play on the airwaves of the (fortuitously named) Columbia Broadcasting System.

These circumstances must have been at least part of the reason that Orson Welles, along with adapter Howard Koch and the actors of the Mercury Theatre, chose to adapt H. G. Well’s nineteenth-century science fiction novel. The fantasy of an alien invasion is rooted in the same colonial anxieties that are driving a widespread state of cultural unrest today. In some ways, the 1938 radio broadcast was an early example of so-called “fake news,” or disinformation, that has become all-too-familiar as it crowds out our social media feeds. On the brink of any conflict, there is a “fog of war” in which the enemy attempts to cloud the battlefield to obscure the movement of their troops. How do we cut through this fog?

This is the conceit and the concept of the production you are about to witness: if you were able to go back in time, and change the given circumstances of any historical event, when and where would you choose to go? Tonight, I invite you to time travel, and revisit the script from the 1938 broadcast as it is presented in 2022. If your goal was to disrupt the source of the original “fake news,” in what ways might you manipulate the original broadcast in order to warn the world about the dangers of disinformation? How might we seek to give people the critical tools they need in order to see when they are being manipulated? How much manipulation is too much? Is there a breaking point?

In the theatre we have a saying. Each time we undertake a production we seek to create a “world of the play.” In contrast, for this production the elements of the story are told in three vernaculars: the presentational, the improvisational, and the representational. Ultimately it is a “War of the Worlds of the Play,” in which some elements may be unreconcilable. You are confronted with the task of cognitively and emotionally reconciling these three different worlds. We ask you, what happens when groups of people start to form their own worlds and can no longer communicate with one another because they no longer share a set of given circumstances?  Can these worlds ever be reconciled?