Lucid Theater’s “Wells and Welles,” with Gerrit Wilford and Pete Blatchford/Photo: Liz Lauren
I fell in love with Orson Welles at the tender age of eleven or twelve while reading “The Panic Broadcast.” Written by Howard Koch—who penned the panic-inducing radio play and later scripted “Casablanca”—the book is an account of how Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre scared the bejeezus out of folks in 1938 with their radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel “War of the Worlds,” about the assault on our planet by tentacled, technically advanced Martians armed with death rays and poison gas.
Updated and recast from straight narrative to mock news report—it even includes stretches of dead air, the ultimate anxiety trigger of the electronic age—Welles’ Halloween trick was taken all too seriously by listeners, many of whom were certain that Grovers Mill, New Jersey was Ground Zero of an interplanetary invasion. The East Coast was spooked, network brass were furious and twenty-three-year-old Orson Welles was suddenly a household name. What appealed to my prepubescent mind was the fact that boy genius Orson had perpetrated history’s greatest practical joke, one never since equaled.
Actually, sending much of the American public—already skittish about Hitler and the prospect of a new war in Europe so soon after the last one—into a conniption fit was only one of Welles’ transgressions. He also neglected to ask H.G. Wells, who was still very much alive at the time, for permission to transform his classic sci-fi tale into a world-class prank. And so, two years later, when Welles ran into Wells in Texas while on a lecture tour designed to raise money for the production of “Citizen Kane,” the older writer—who had considered suing Welles for copyright infringement—was not overjoyed to see him.
Lucid Theater’s “Wells and Welles,” with Gerrit Wilford and Pete Blatchford/Photo: Liz Lauren
And that’s the starting point of “Wells and Welles,” Amy Crider’s world-premiere dramatization of the two men’s meeting. Crider’s two-person play—plus a nice cameo appearance by Jeff Broitman as a San Antonio radio interviewer—is capably directed by Amber Mandley and staged within a simple, serviceable motel-room set designed by Kevin Rolis. It’s literate, polished, thoughtful and generally high-toned; all in all, a classy and edifying evening of theater. It’s also verbose, lacking in compelling action and conflict, and thematically somewhat murky, as though the two protagonists (or are they antagonists?) were beings of pure thought and idea, rather than flesh-and-blood people. Playwright Crider, who is also Lucid Theater’s artistic director, is clearly a talented wordsmith and a thorough researcher, whose depiction of Wells and Welles seems largely accurate and plausible. But the show often comes off as two one-man shows that occasionally intersect, rather than a true two-hander. We never discover just what it is that these two well-spoken but inert characters either want or learn from each other on an emotional level.
What the show does have going for it are the energetic and intelligent performances by the two leads. Pete Blatchford plays the aging H.G. Wells as a feisty little English gamecock, struttingly proud of his worldwide fame, his literary accomplishment and his influence with world leaders—as the play opens, he’s typing a letter to President Roosevelt. By contrast, Gerrit Wilford’s youthful Orson Welles is a complicated blend of driven, visionary artist and charismatic hustler, his boyish charm balanced by a nagging impostor syndrome. He admits to riding on H.G. Wells’ coattails, noting that, “Without you, I wouldn’t be making [‘Citizen Kane’].” Both performers are immersed in their parts and not only play off each other well but also seem to be having a good deal of fun, which is infectious.
Lucid Theater’s “Wells and Welles,” with Gerrit Wilford, Pete Blatchford and Jeff Broitman/Photo: Liz Lauren
The seventy-five-minute-long show’s best moment is when Orson, pretending to have read H.G.’s novel, “In the Days of the Comet,” lures H.G. into collaborating with him on a film treatment of the book in order to persuade the reluctant writer into doing a joint, publicity-generating interview on a San Antonio radio station. Here, something is really happening and the play has momentum. Elsewhere, though, the script feels more like conjoined monologues, with Orson arguing for the necessity of myth and magic to move the public (“The winner is the one who tells the best story”), while H.G. scoffs at his younger near-namesake as a “vacuous celebrity” and pompously asserts that “I engage in truth.” It’s an odd and not quite believable argument from a man who rose from obscurity on the basis of his fantastic novels—such as “The Invisible Man” and “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” not to mention “The War of the Worlds”—which laid the foundation for modern science fiction. The debate between the two is resolved amicably, if not quite convincingly.
The play never hits a high gear dramatically and ends on an anticlimax. But I still found “Wells and Welles” enjoyable, for the simple reason that, over the play’s single act, we do get to know these two closely tied, larger-than-life figures with the weirdly similar surnames. At a certain point, the show shades into reality, as we hear a scratchy recording of the two men talking over the radio. It’s a powerful theatrical moment, giving us a glimpse of the personalities and motivations behind their carefully chosen words, now frozen in time.
“Wells and Welles” isn’t a perfect show, but there’s something magical about the way it brings the past to life. Anyone with an interest in either Wells and/or Welles—or, more broadly, the way that imagination acts upon and shapes the future—should see this production.
Lucid Theater presents “Wells and Welles” at City Lit Theater, 1020 West Bryn Mawr, through August 11. Tickets are $25 and are available here.
