A Blast from Entertainment Past

From playwright Joe Landry, author of the popular It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, comes a new blast from the entertainment past: War of the Worlds: The Panic Broadcast. This radio play within a play, which opens Ensemble Theatre Company’s 2025-26 season, reenacts Orson Welles’s 1938 radio-drama adaptation of HG Wells’s novel about Martians landing on Earth. As performed by Welles’s theater company, War of the Worlds imitated actual news coverage — leading many 1930s citizens (who couldn’t cross-check information on Google) to mistake fiction for fact. “The ensemble is strong, and the pace is quick,” says director Jamie Torcellini. “It’s a nice piece of art.”

While the show, with its vintage costumes and live foley art, is fun and compelling, Torcellini reminds us that the story is an example of the potential for hype and panic caused by the perpetuation of misinformation. These characters are not just performing a radio drama — they are also managing the outside drama caused by the unintentional hoax. “Unfortunately, fear is blinding,” Torcellini says, pointing out that when this broadcast originally aired, a fearful, angry social climate was driving the world toward a major war. “We have to be careful and take responsibility for finding out what the real truth is, and not just listening to a mouthpiece,” he says. “Do your research. Dig down into the people that you put your trust into.” 

In response to the current, toxic media frenzy, War of the Worlds features a reconstructed, abstract ending that Torcellini describes as “a cacophony of historic radio addresses that become a big noise.” Whether you’re looking for social commentary to make you feel seen or spooky Halloween-season theatrics, War of the Worlds: The Panic Broadcast is a classic American story within a classic American story. 

War of the Worlds: The Panic Broadcast runs at the New Vic (33 W. Victoria St.) October 8-26. See etcsb.org.