From playwright Joe Landry, author of the popular It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, comes a new blast from the entertainment past: War of the Worlds: The Panic Broadcast. This radio play within a play, which opens Ensemble Theatre Company’s 2025-26 season, reenacts Orson Welles’s 1938 radio-drama adaptation of HG Wells’s novel about Martians landing on Earth. As performed by Welles’s theater company, War of the Worlds imitated actual news coverage — leading many 1930s citizens (who couldn’t cross-check information on Google) to mistake fiction for fact. These characters are not just performing a radio drama — they are also managing the outside drama caused by the unintentional hoax. War of the Worlds: The Panic Broadcast runs at the New Vic (33 W. Victoria St.) October 8-26.