MRH: Most of the writing in Welles’ productions was very prosaic, and I wonder if it was tough for the actors?

AB: Most of the writing in WOW is not Welles. Welles weighed in for sure, but it was mostly Howard Koch. The thing that gave me confidence to direct this was that all the characters were essentially two-dimensional - they were all pretend.

We’re trying to make people believe that the Martians have landed, and it’s all about characters, right? The character of the Captain, the character of the Professor - [it] was more about capturing a voice than a full, complex character, so in that sense the text was not difficult, or it wasn’t intimidating in any way.

MRH: The actors must have gotten a kick out of it, because while it was essentially a handful of people on stage, they were responsible for creating all these different characters which were men of differing ages and dialects, a group undergoing collective mass hysteria, or a foot-stomping army troupe.

AB: I hope so. It looked like it.

MRH: For Bernard Herrmann’s music, I noticed score elements were applied in the play’s second half, and being a Herrmann nut myself, I couldn’t help picking out pieces of music. I’m pretty sure it was “The Lonely” suite from The Twilight Zone that you adapted for the second half.

AB: Yeah, that was all Dan Paar’s doing, and also something the pianist also pointed out. You know, my attention during rehearsal was going in a million directions, and I don’t know if you remember, but the first 3 notes of the underscoring on the bass clarinet – again, it’s like a testament to Dan’s cleverness - but they were from the Holst suite The Planets, from the movement “Mars” which he snuck.

MRH: The curtain rise suite was more of a mash-up of Herrmann motifs with themes carefully woven together, and every so often going back and quoting or riffing something heard earlier.

AB: Exactly, and superimposing and using themes from one movie, or sneaking them back in once we’ve already gone on to another movie. That was all Dan’s doing.

MRH: He also focused on a number of scores that aren’t well known. I liked the fact The Naked and the Dead (1958) was woven in there, and the pilot episode of The Twilight Zone, “Where is Everybody?” (1959).

That particular episode is emblematic of the simple writing Herrmann used to convey some really eerie moods, and moments of human vulnerability, particularly the sense of a character slowly discovering something horrible, and reacting in gradual stages.

Last question: For the production itself, most of the shows were pretty much sold out. Was WOW a difficult production to mount, and do you have eyes on another production in the near future?

AB: Yeah, it was the biggest thing we had ever attempted until that point, just in terms of scope and money. It was a milestone of sorts for us, but we do 6 or 7 projects a year. Next season is already planned, and we’re going to do another big theatrical thing which is completely different, [and] that Daniel Brooks is going to direct.

It’s a very beautiful piece. It’s going to be done at CanStage. There’s a book of correspondences between John Berger (who’s one of my favourite writers) and John Christie, whom I hadn’t heard of before [but] was a British filmmaker and painter, and was a close friend of Berger.

[Their exchanges] are remarkably poetic. They’re almost love letters between two guys who really admire each other and want to impress each other or move each other, and they’re all meditations on colour, in terms of literature and music and nature.

The BBC did a radio show, and they took 15 of those letters and had Gavin Bryars, a British composer, underscore them, so we’re going to stage that with a live band and two actors, and animation and colour, and I’m sort of in the midst of figuring that one out now.

Editor’s note: the music from Bryars’ 2002 production, “I send you this cadmium red,” is available on CD, as is Berger’s book.