“The First Radio Play Printed in America”: “Sue ‘Em” (1925) and the Ensuing Question of Legitimacy

Here I go again.  Another broadcasting centenary, another radio “first.”  This “First,” mind, is wrapped in quotation marks, as the claim is not mine.  I am not going to dispute it, either, or challenge someone else to have the last word in the old “Who’s on First?” routine.  I have been there before.

Picture it: Early 2024.  I am commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of radio “drama” at an event I staged with British playwright Lucy Gough at the National Library of Wales.  I set out by acknowledging the widely held assumption that Comedy of Danger by playwright-novelist Richard Hughes was the “first” original radio play to be broadcast … anywhere.

The claim served as a hook.  It was designed to underscore the international significance of the event.  At the same time, I tried to justify its happening in Wales by drawing attention to the play’s Welsh setting and the playwright’s affinity with the country.  More important to me than arriving at a definitive answer to the vexed question of whether Comedy of Danger should be regarded as the “first” of its kind are the shifting definitions of the term “radio play” on which, to my mind, hinges the answer to that question—or rather, its unanswerability and ultimate pointlessness.

After all, it is difficult to say what is “first” in any field if the field itself is not clearly delimited first, or if the field is so limitless that it defies delineation in the first place.  In the case of “radio play,” Hörspiel (play for listening) or radio drama—relatively arcane though this field of study may be—definitions not only vary greatly but are often not even attempted.

When is a play a radio play? That is a question I have been asking for a long time in my musings on the wireless, and it is a question I keep asking myself.  “When is a play a radio play” strikes me as a more useful way of framing the debate than the more obvious question “What is a radio play?” because the former encourages us to avoid the most perfunctory of answers: A radio play is a play written for and/or heard on the radio.  

Sure, on the surface it barely scratches, that statement sounds reasonable enough.  But are all plays written and produced for radio broadcasting radio plays by default? Is it the medium, then, that makes a play—any play—a radio play?

Not that “radio” as we understand or know it these days bears a close resemblance to “radio”—as a receiver set, a system, and a phenomenon—anno 1925, the year when Sue ‘Em, proclaimed by its publisher to be the “first radio play printed” in the USA, successfully made a play for first place in a radio playwrighting contest.

Written by Nancy Bancroft Brosius, a Cleveland librarian, Sue ‘Em was the prize winner of a “Radio Drama Contest” run by WGBS, a New York radio station that, between 1924 to 1928, was owned by the department store Gimbels, a representative of which corporation also served as one of the judges, as did drama critic Oliver M. Sayler.  In his writings, Sayler specialized in Russian and Avant-garde theater; but, on the air, he presented Footlight and Lamplight, a weekly program featuring book and theater reviews.

The news that Brosius had won the $75 award was widely reported at the time, with mentions appearing in the New York Times and the trade magazine Variety.  “Brentano’s will issue the comedy in printed form,” Variety reported on 2 August 1925, adding that “Miss Brosius” would “receive the regular author’s royalties from the sale of the book,” as well as “royalties on each subsequent production of the piece, whether on the air or by dramatic organizations.”

While the promise of residuals may have made the medium sound more attractive to writers adventurous enough to venture into broadcasting, the royalty payments for Sue ‘Em probably did not amount to much, despite the script’s availability as a published volume, itself a rare distinction for radio plays.

Sue ‘Em aired at least once—on 29 December 1925.  No recording of that production appears—or is likely—to be extant.  It is unclear how many listeners it attracted or how the broadcast was received.  Few, if any, journalists troubled themselves to tune in and review the play.

Appearing in print, however, Sue ‘Em was far less ephemeral than much that went on the air during those pre-television days of broadcasting, or indeed thereafter.  “Comes to our desk a copy of Sue ‘Em,” John Wallace wrote in his column for Radio Broadcast in April 1926:

Unfortunately (or fortunately?) we didn’t hear the play presented, but we have just read it through two times—the second trip being attributable only to our burning desire to discover, if possible, why it won the prize.  That discovery we have yet to make.  We dismiss the most ready answer—that it was the best one submitted—as a rather too unkind reflection on the other contestants.

We learn a little about those “other contestants” in Thurston Macauley’s Introduction to Su ‘Em, in which Oliver “Footlight and Lamplight” Sayler is quoted as saying that a “frequent fault” that the “judges found among the manuscripts was a failure to remember that radio drama, unlike good little children, is heard but not seen.”

In that respect, Macauley argued, “[h]e or she who would a radio dramatist be may learn a few pointers by studying Miss Brosius’ piece.”  After all, he added, while “[m]any plays have been enacted before the microphones of many a radio station, […] few plays of the world’s store of dramatic literature are good radio plays.”

Not that Macauley was an authority in radio drama production.  As I discovered for myself during research conducted for this entry in my journal—because I felt compelled to find out more about the writer expounding on “The Radio Play”—he had acted in a 1924 Cherry Lane Theater production of the British tragicomedy The Man Who Ate the Popomack” (1922) and would later distinguish himself as a writer, editor, and war correspondent.

Perhaps realizing his lack of experience writing on the subject of radio plays, Macauley gave much of his Introduction to Sue ‘Em over to Sayler, who defended his judgment of the winning entry as a “good” play “effective for broadcasting” by pointing out its brevity, its realism, as well as its intelligibility.  “Each of the four figures is so sharply defined,” Sayler remarked, “that there is no mistaking who is talking.”

Clearly, as a “theater” critic, Sayler looked upon radio plays as stage drama without the visuals, which is apparent in his views on the “fault which was frequently encountered” among the plays entered into the WGBS contest, namely that the “choice of a subject so fantastic that all methods by which illusion is gained in an actual theater would be necessary to make the play convincing.”

The endless possibilities presented by radio plays as a form of writing for performance that is not tethered to the boards, bound in volumes or proscribed by visuals apparently had not occurred to him, much less the altogether too revolutionary notion that plays for listening need not be scripted at all and may be nonverbal. 

Brosius herself placed her play firmly in the theatrical tradition by installing an impresario—announcer, in broadcasting parlance—tasked with setting the scene and introducing the characters.  The preamble concludes with the words: “Now, our curtain is ready to rise, and our actors are standing in the wings—awaiting their cues.  Mrs. Dorn is the first you are to hear from.  Ready!”

Must the invisible “O” of the air be imagined as having curtain and wings? Need it be conceived as a theatrical stage? So much for either realism and make-believe.  Perhaps more realistic—but also a trifle more alienating—is the playwright’s image of her audience: “Picture to yourselves,” the announcer invites the listener, “a typically middle-class American apartment—rather shabby and run down.”

However awkward that supposition may sound, making “middle-class” tuners-in self-conscious about their living quarters as “shabby and run down” might have struck the judge representing WGBS—and thus Gimbels—as a sly attempt to encourage a department store visit in view of redecorating.

At least the Dorn family—the four characters of the play, who are about to head out to the movies as the action commences—are presented as consumers, the father having gone out to get a cigar. Meanwhile, the daughter of the house is in need of a “clean slip,” prompting the exasperated mother to exclaim: “I wish to Heaven you’d keep better track of your underwear.” What a flapper!

Sue ‘Em is reminiscent of a situation comedy, even though, in 1925, the sitcom was not yet a thing.  By resorting to that anachronism, I do not mean to employ the term to denigrate Sue ‘Em as a cultural product.  If the product is negligible, it is the result of a neglect, an inattention to the as yet largely undiscovered country of broadcasting, the life that lies beyond the “actual stage” on which, Sayler insisted, Sue ‘Em “would play well.”

And yet, while the play would “likely enter into the repertory of many a Little Theater,” Sayler declared, its “author bore in mind throughout her work the conditions that surround radio drama.”  That, however, is not borne out by the published script.  

Referencing Sue ‘Em in Immaterial Culture, my study of the radio play in relation to drama and literature, I argued that the play “showed little understanding of the medium by including stage instructions for actors to rub their ‘right leg painfully’ or to wave their arms about ‘unnoticed.’”

In its inclusion of such theatrical stage instructions, Sue ‘Em echoes the inability of a public weaned on visuals—the printed page, stage theatricals, and the silent screen—to embrace and effectively utilize the new sound-only medium.

The bias in favor of the theater as the real thing, and the attitude toward radio as an illegitimate offspring of the legitimate stage, was widespread and lasting, and it was detrimental to the development of the radio play.  A critic commenting on the state of the radio play a decade later, in 1934, declared that “[i]f a current radio script were to be compared with this forerunner of the craft [i. e., Sue ‘Em], there would be little change noticeable.  Perhaps the naive stage directions would be deleted.  But that would be all.”

As I pointed out in Immaterial Culture,the same commentators who

demanded “new and distinct” plays for the medium insisted that “nothing short of an all-star cast culled from the headliners of the legitimate stage would be able to put across a flawless radio play, so difficult is the chore.”

The producers of Sue ‘Em attempted just that: to legitimize a radio play by casting actors from the “legitimate stage.”  Macauley makes mention of a broadcast of “scenes from Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones” emanating from the WGBS studio in the year prior to the 1925 radio premiere of Sue’ Em, the entire cast of which was, in fact, was comprised of Provincetown Players, the company noted for their productions of O’Neill plays.

I am glad to have come across a photograph of the cast, which was published in the April 1926 issue of Radio Broadcast that also contains the dismissive review quoted above.  Otherwise, I would not have noticed that, among the players, was a young John Huston, who would later distinguish himself as a film director with notable motion pictures including Humphrey Bogart vehicles such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), and The African Queen (1951).  

Never mind that the original Provincetown Players had disbanded in 1922 and reformed in 1923 as the Experimental Theatre Company.  Just prior to the broadcast of Sue ‘Em, Huston’s father, Walter Huston, had acted in a stage production of Desire Under the Elms by Eugene O’Neill.  Having watched and admired his father in that production, John Huston could not have been under any illusion that Sue ‘Em ranked high among the experimental plays of the legitimate theater.  

“Beyond a doubt,” Macauley concludes his Introduction to the published playscript,

not a few men who are doing fine things for the stage to-day may to-morrow be writing for the theater of the air.  And who knows what Shaws and O’Neills the radio will give birth to?

The enthusiasm rings hollow, especially considering that the Introduction was written two weeks before the play was broadcast.  Macauley had not experienced Sue ‘Em as it was, presumably, intended to be presented: for the ear, not for the eye.

Dismissing Sue ‘Em as a trifle by comparing it to modernist stage plays misses the mark.  Supposed “greatness” is not a criterion that could be of any use when trying to define what a radio play is.  It is not critical or popular success that determines whether a play is fit for stage or radio.  Besides, radio plays, whether they enthralled listeners, put them to sleep or made them twist the dial in search of alternatives—generally enjoyed far greater audiences on a single day than many famous plays of the legitimate stage in their entire run.

Sue ‘Em, the “First Radio Play Printed in America” certainly marks a milestone in broadcasting.  All the same, it was being pulverized by the millstone of a theatrical tradition and misguided attempts set in motion to make it a theatrical event worth commemorating in print.

It is both frustrating and fascinating to witness the struggle faced by writers and producers of plays for the air—frequently referred to as “radio drama”—to gain independence from stage, screen and print media in order more fully to take advantage of the freedom to imagine that the form permits.

Assessing the evidence of forces conspiring to keep the so-called “theater of the mind” confined to the proscenium arch playhouse that could never contain it, I nonetheless sense the futility of tilting at those relentlessly grinding windmills and shouting … “Sue ‘Em.”