Jean West

On October 30, 1938, just before 8:00 pm, Americans gathered around the radio to listen to Mercury Theatre On The Air, an anthology series produced and hosted by Orson Welles. That evening's program, scripted by Howard Koch, was a modern-day adaptation of H.G. Well's The War of the Worlds, one of the first tales of alien invasion, in which Martians emerged from meteors to lay waste to all of the Earth's civilizations. Except that Koch, with help from producers John Houseman, Paul Stewart and Welles himself, structured the program to play, at least in the first moments, as special news bulletins interrupting a normal performance by a dance orchestra. The ruse seems thin even for the time, but Hitler had 'annexed' Austria a few months earlier, and was threatening to do more, so the program struck a chord and the resulting panic in the area in close proximity - Welles' Martians landed in a New Jersey pasture, sent East Coast residents scurrying across bridges and clogging highways.

Kentucky Shakespeare is announces the production of Orson Welles' radio drama of H.G. Wells' science fiction masterpiece The War of the Worlds. This 6-actor, 70-minute production will be performed live at the Louisville Public Media Performance Studio on select nights October 10-28, 2018.