By Harold Egeln
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

BROOKLYN COLLEGE – News Flash! Martians have invaded Brooklyn with deadly heat rays and pterodactyls are swooping down over Flatbush.

Don’t panic! The “news� is old, and from 1930s fictional radio plays re-enacted on Sunday afternoon to launch the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College’s 2008-09 season.

On Sunday evening, Oct. 30, 1938, listeners of CBS radio’s network’s Mercury Theatre on the Air heard a pre-Halloween live broadcast adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds� produced by Howard Koch with director Orson Welles, done in a lifelike news broadcast style. Countless numbers of radio listeners around the city and across the nation took it seriously, creating a nationwide panic with fleeing and terrified citizens.

Actors at Brooklyn College’s Walt Whitman Theatre recreated that night that panicked America, subject of a 1970s TV movie, with lively perfection by the L.A. Theatre Works touring company under producing director Susan Albert Loewenberg. They also did a melodramatic, satirical radio play version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World.�

The delightful effect of the enthralling performances was like traveling back seven decades in a Wells’ Time Machine, with some audience members, perhaps, remembering the original broadcast from their youths and others through movies.

Performances Bridge Time As ‘Radio Days’ Live Again

“Fake Radio ‘War’ Stirs Terror Through U.S.� read the Daily News banner front-page headline in its Oct. 31, 1938 edition. This one-time only Brooklyn performance, which did not panic the audience but chilled and thrilled it, marked the 70th anniversary of that historic broadcast made in this city.

The second play, by the author of the “Sherlock Holmes� books, was about an expedition that found dinosaurs still alive in a remote Amazon jungle and returned with a live pterodactyl that escaped over London. The radio play was adapted by scriptwriters John de Lancie, known to television watchers as the character “Q� in “Star Trek: The Next Generation�; and by Nat Sagaloff, a former journalist now specializing in Hollywood lore.

The electrically riveting performances launched the Brooklyn Center’s new season featuring other shows, concerts, dances, faculty recitals and special events.

When “War of the Worlds� was broadcast during radio’s golden age in 1938, Americans had war jitters and were still emerging from the Great Depression. Movies followed later, including the classic 1953 movie produced by George Pal, the 2005 Steve Spielberg movie with Tom Hanks, and a recent British movie faithful to the original novel. There was also a network television series in the late 1980s.

“In post-9/11 America, the parable of the Martians’ self-destruction might correlate to our political policies and the destruction wrought by terrorists, Wells’ text is not just about the invasion from outside but also from within,� writes Loewenberg in her program notes.

L.A. Theatre Works is the nation’s premiere radio theater company, producing a classic and contemporary library of over 400 staged, recorded and touring radio play performances. It has broadcasts on NPR, XM Satellite Radio, the BBC and CBC.

Doing the reenactments was a superb and stellar cast with outstanding stage, screen and television credits. They were Josh Clark, Kyle Colerider-Krugh, Jen Dede, Jerry Hardin, Peter McDonald, and Kenneth Alan Williams. They played characters such as Princeton University astronomer Prof. Richard Pierson, radio broadcaster Carl Philips and a Grovers Mill farmer, among others.

In “The Lost World,� Professor Challenger was the key character, along with an intrepid reporter, “ape-men� and hapless others. In this laugh-filled performance, audience participation included on-cue clapping, boos and gorilla grunts.

“Our new season of music, dance, and theatre features an extraordinary array of international performances from five continents, representing Argentina, Israel, Jamaica, Russia, South Africa, Mali, Australia, and the United States,� said Brooklyn Center Managing Director Frank Sonntag.

For more information, visit www.BrooklynCenterOnline.org and contact (718) 951-4500.

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