First things first: The acoustics at Tampa's Friday Morning Musicale are so bad, I couldn't understand fully half of the dialogue in Stageworks' The War of the Worlds. Yes, I could occasionally make out a replay of Orson Welles' famous 1938 broadcast, which convinced a million Americans that Martians were invading New Jersey; but so many of the words spoken from the Musicale stage were muffled and garbled, I had no idea what was being said, and certainly couldn't tell whether the acting was competent. True, Karla Hartley's adaptation includes two "contemporary" characters who audibly provide a frame story as well as commentary. But the meat of the show — Welles' radio hoax — was half lost on this critic, and I was sitting in the fifth row. I might have been hearing a foreign language.
The radio broadcast which War of the Worlds aims to reproduce occurred on October 30, 1938, just in time for Halloween. In it, Orson Welles, working with Howard Koch's updated version of H. G. Wells' (no relation) novel, presided over a series of news flashes detailing the crash landing in a New Jersey field of what at first seemed a meteorite, but then proved to be an alien spacecraft. Employing several actors to play a radio reporter, a Princeton astronomer, the Secretary of the Interior and other phony officials, Welles convinced credulous listeners that the intruders were using a heat ray to slaughter onlookers, and a black gas cloud to mow down citizens all the way to Manhattan — their ostensible objective. Audiences throughout the nation, many of whom had missed Welles' introductory disclaimer, were convinced by the broadcast, with some fleeing their homes and others overwhelming phone lines with calls to police. Some panicking citizens apparently thought it was the Germans who were invading, and not Martians at all. Others went to the scene of the putative landing, creating such havoc that the area began to look like the mass confusion described on the air.
What Hartley — who is also the director and lighting designer — does with this scenario is give it to two actors only — Michael McGreevy and Ricky Cona — and have them assume over 20 roles, from Welles and Edward R. Murrow to Professor Pierson of Princeton and various police and military men. But before the famous broadcast begins, Hartley introduces us to "Spencer" and "Summer," played by Spencer Meyers and Summer Bohnenkamp-Jenkins. These two college students have apparently just broken into the theater — couldn't this have been done at home? — in order to discuss staging a replay of the infamous 1938 broadcast. Trying to put the broadcast in context, they mistakenly claim that radio audiences were jumpy because of World War II (which of course hadn't started yet), and also because most listeners had tuned in late after listening to the Chase and Sanborn Hour on NBC. After some minutes, their discussion of the broadcast magically turns into the broadcast itself, with all its muddy vicissitudes. Finally, Spence tells Summer of two copycat radio shows that followed, one in Quito, Ecuador in 1949, and the other in Buffalo, New York in 1968. We're treated to excerpts of both programs — even garbled, the latter one's too long — and finally Spence and Summer try to draw a moral from all these hoaxes. You shouldn't, it turns out, believe everything you hear.
Are Spence and Summer really necessary? They're charming and informative, but their discussion is usually artificial and poorly motivated. Further weakening the production is the lack of a set — aside from a couple of Japanese screens — and Hartley's strangely unhelpful lighting, which has us straining to see Spence and Summer all through the evening. The show lasts only 75 minutes without an intermission, but with the sound problems, this hour-and-a-quarter seems long. Insofar as I could make it out on the night I attended, Koch's script is genuinely riveting: surely this is how radio might sound after such an invasion. But what should be an opportunity to evaluate Welles' broadcast for ourselves turns into a test of our hearing — and our patience.
A thought: Maybe the point of War of the Worlds is to sharpen our appetite for Stageworks' new space in the Channel District. Maybe this show is supposed to goad donors into supplying those last thousands of dollars.
If so, hear my plea. Please, benefactors, show your magnanimity. Move Stageworks into its new state-of-the-art facility.
This (usually) wonderful theater company deserves better than the Musicale.
This article appears in Oct 14-20, 2010.