Gather the household around, dim the lights, click here -- then sit back and enjoy the radio theater of Orson Welles.

This week . . . "A Passenger To Bali".

Orson Welles loved popular fiction and never looked down on it, which is why in his own work he could move so easily between pulp thrillers like Touch Of Evil and classics like the plays of Shakespeare.  He saw the power of popular tales and so could locate the popular appeal within the tales of the masters.

He simply ignored the artificial highbrow/lowbrow categories of the 20th-Century intelligentsia and served instead the gratification of the audience, which is what all true artists do.



Passenger To Bali was a short thriller written by Ellis St. Joseph, dramatized for the next to last offering of the Mercury Theater On the Air's first season on radio.

This show will only be on the site for a short while so download it if you can't listen to it right away and tune in next time for the company's last offering of that first season -- a dramatization of The Pickwick Papers.

[You can get more information on Welles's radio work and listen to or download many of his broadcasts here -- The Mercury Theater On the Air.  Many more broadcasts can be downloaded at this resource page on Wellesnet.  If you get hooked, you can buy a remarkable collection of almost all of Welles' radio work, as both actor and director, in MP3 format on 7 CDs at OTRCat -- which also offers the discs separately.]