The Raleigh Little Theatre is putting on The Battle of Shallowford from October 5-21, 2007.  Here’s an overview of the play from their website:

Ed Simpson’s play is an endearing story about what happens when the
residents of the small town of Shallowford (based on Lewisville, NC)
believe Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds" to be
legitimate news. They fall hook, line and sinker, and grab their
pitchforks and hunting rifles, and run out to do battle with the
invading Martians and save the world.

The characters in the play are:

• Burton Mock
• Ruthie Mock
• Lonny Hutchins
• Clunette Campbell
• Roy Sprinkle
• Dewey Sowers
• Newsome Jarvis
• "Doodad" Jarvis
• Fred Martin

The playwright, Ed Simpson, is a native of Lewisville so it should come as no surprise that the characters’ names sound familiar.  There are a TON of Mocks in the area (Mocksville is just 1/2 hour down the road) and we still have a Sowers on the town council.  Heck one of the barbers at the barbershop I go to is David Sowers.

I stumbled across this listing for the production in one of my news feeds and after seeing that it is based on the small town in which I live I started to do some digging.  I found a nice piece written by Mr. Simpson in 2003 upon his stumbling across a production of the play at Western Carolina University.  In it he mentions that he’s returning to North Carolina after living in Pennsylvania for 27 years, and after a little more digging I found his website and lo’ and behold he’s moved to Winston-Salem.  He’s now playwright-in-residence at High Point University.

In an interview that appeared in the LA Times in 2000 and is posted on his site Mr. Simpson states that Lewisville was a town of 500 residents when he was growing up (he’s in his mid-fifties now).  Lewisville is up to around 13,000 residents today and I have a new-found appreciation for how much this area has changed in the last 30-40 years.

West Side Civic Theatre put on a production of the play back in 2003, so maybe they’d be willing to put on another one in the near future at Shallowford Square. There are enough new folks around, myself included, that I think it would be a winner at the box office.  Oh, wait, West Side’s shows are free.  Okay, let’s just say you’d see plenty of lawn chairs in the Square that weekend.

Last note: You can read a preview of the play here at Google Books.