“Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At twenty minutes before eight, Central Time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving towards the Earth with enormous velocity...”



And that is only the beginning of what listeners heard the evening of October 30, 1938 when Orson Welles unleashed his infamous adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel The War of the Worlds on an unsuspecting radio audience. Welles was just 23 years old at the time. His great films – Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, A Touch of Evil – were all still ahead of him, but on this night the radio show made him a star.

It was Welles’ genius to adapt War of the Worlds for his Mercury Theatre radio show by breaking this story of a Martian invasion into news bulletins. The bulletins were familiar to radio audiences, who by that time had grown accustomed to unsettling news-breaks in the middle of their entertainment shows reporting the latest on conflicts overseas. It was the form of Welles’ adaptation that made World so frightening, and convinced so many listeners the Martian invasion was real. On Saturday night, the Ouray County Players will pay tribute to that form and present their own live reading of Welles’ adaptation at the Wright Opera House. They will re-create what 1938 listeners heard in exacting detail, right down to the sound of a 1938 doorbell. Nancy Nixon (by day, a Ouray School librarian) and Dan Preston (pastor of the Ouray Baptist Church) are in charge of sound effects which, given the sinister nature of this script, will range from “ticking, scraping, hissing, shrieking, explosions and the sound a falling body makes when it hits the ground,” Nixon said. The real noise a falling body makes is not what people imagine it sounds like, she pointed out; she re-creates the thudding the audience expects by dropping a duct-tape-wrapped bag of flour to the ground. About the doorbell: Nixon actually has one from 1938, donated by a Ouray resident whose home dates from that time. Preston will help out with natural sounds; his ability to mimic the sounds found in nature is reportedly uncanny. He – not an actual canine – supplied the voice of the baying hunting dog in the Players’ most recent live radio production, last fall’s Sherlock Holmes’ Hound of the Baskervilles.

Although the cast and director will be faithful to Welles’ adaptation, they will also be on a barebones stage, holding scripts in their hands. Then again, imagination is a powerful thing. As audiences who attend staged readings know, once the lights dim and the script recitation begins, a play takes on new life and becomes a living, breathing thing. Director Michael Hockensmith (by day, a Ouray attorney) adapted a script of Sherlock-the-play into last year’s annual radio show. He has always loved the story of War of the Worlds, and wanted to direct a stage-adaptation of it for years. “You can stream [the original radio show] online. Even today it’s very powerful. It’s strong stuff,” he said. Welles’ adaptation ends by reminding the audience that the performance was a fiction, but by that point, in 1938, listeners were so worked up it hardly mattered. How different will it be at the Wright in 2012? “Goodbye, everybody, and remember the terrible lesson you learned tonight,” the narrator intones. “The grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if the doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian.” Happy Halloween. This one-night-only event is a fundraiser for the Wright Opera House. Donations are greatly appreciated. Doors open at 6:15 p.m.