Category: Radio Plays

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On This Day in 1930: ‘”Mystery Gun” Disappears As Lights Go Out’ in Invisible Courtroom

I don’t suppose I shall ever get used to it. The Welsh weather, I mean, the nocturnal roars and howlings of which I often drown out by listening to the familiar voices of old-time radio, reassuring and comforting voices like those of Harry Bartell or Elliot Lewis, both of whom were born on this day, 28 November, in 1913 and 1917, respectively. Storms are part of the Welsh soundscape, much like the bleating of sheep on the hills. If such climate conditions were faced by the people of New York, among whom I numbered for some fifteen years of my life, I wager that the local television newscasts would report little else. To be sure, last night’s storm did make headlines, being that a tornado wreaked havoc in a village just a few miles from my present home.

Thanks to some well-chosen radio thriller, I managed to sleep through it all, losing myself in dreams that, once radioactivated, tend to become particularly vivid. I often wonder just how much my mind, conscious or not, is influenced by the popular culture I consume by listening in. Sometimes, though, it is what we hear about, and not what we perceive, that stirs our imagination. There are a few listening experiences I can only dream of, plays I have only read or read about and consequently fascinate me no end. One such unheard soundplay is the serial The Trial of Vivienne Ware (previously mentioned here and discussed at some length in Etherized, my study of American radio dramatics). Pulled by the Hearst press and propagated on the air by station WJZ, New York, it was a spectacular publicity stunt designed to promote Hearst’s less than reputable papers.

Those tuning in did not only get to hear the proceedings, but were cast as jurors. They stood a chance of being awarded $1000 for coming up with the most convincing verdict (be it “guilty” or “innocent”), thus making it unnecessary for the author of the story—one Kenneth M. Ellis—to determine upon a reasonable conclusion and the fate of his titular character.

From the 25th to the last day of November, the fictional trial was broadcast live, with eminent figures of law and politics, New York Senator Robert F. Wagner and prominent attorney Ferdinand Pecora, heading a cast that included noted stage actress Rosamund Pinchot. Here is how the New York American, the Hearst paper sponsoring the series, described the session of 28 November 1930:

It was almost at the close of the session that the lights suddenly were extinguished and the court plunged into total darkness. Women’s screams, the shouts and bustle of court attaches, and the hammering of the gavel filled five or six black seconds with sound. Then the lights came on again—but the .38 caliber revolver which George Gordon Battle, chief counsel for Vivienne Ware, had just introduced as evidence had disappeared from the table where it lay.

Now, that’s a melodramatic conjuring act fit for the airwaves. It probably wouldn’t do much good during a stormy night, though, since such interactive thrills—let alone the pondering of the verdict, and what to do with the prize money—are, unlike much else that was presented on American radio with comforting predictability, anything but soporific.

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Now As Then: "Thanksgiving Day—1941"

Well, it took me some time to get it. Thanksgiving, I mean. Being German, I was unaccustomed to the holiday when I moved to the United States in the early 1990s. I didn’t quite understand what Steve Martin’s character in Trains, Planes & Automobiles was so desperately rushing home to . . . until I had lived long enough on American soil to sense the significance of this day. Now that I am living in Britain and, unlike last year, not flying back to America to observe it, I wish I could import the tradition.

I don’t mean to ship over all the trimmings and fixings, the pies and the parade. Just the concept of an annual get-together that encourages one to reflect upon what matters in life—provided that those who matter as “family” are understood to be any gathering of people (and, Montague insists, pets) whose presence spells home.

To the horror of some, an Americanized Halloween has caught on big time here during the last few years. Why not a grown-up holiday like Thanksgiving, regardless of the direction in which the Pilgrims were heading? With an eye to the future, I am not even being ahistorical.

A feast in defiance of the old saw that you can’t go home again, Thanksgiving is often thought of as an occasion to wax nostalgic. Sure, it is a time to look back; but that does not mean it should exhaust itself in sentimentality. It can be an incentive to pull through, an event for which people pull themselves and one other together in the face of adversities.

Belittled as a ritualistic tripping on tryptophan, bemoaned as an annual family headcount that starts with the headache of getting there and ends in a bellyache getting back, Thanksgiving still compels millions to travel hundreds of miles and, unlike Christmas, has remained remarkably free from commercialism. It mobilizes more folks than a national election. It is a day of the people, not of corporation (unless you are running an airline). And despite its culinary excesses, it is simple, solid, and reassuringly primal in its cheering of the harvest and the life we owe the land and its natural riches.

A celebration “wholly of our earth,” is how the aforementioned American poet Stephen Vincent Benét expressed the meaning of the day in a speech delivered by actor Brian Donlevy and broadcast on 19 November 1941, just a few weeks before the US entered the Second World War. “This year it is and must be a sober feast,” Benét reminded the listener. Even if the attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise, the bombs over London were clear enough signs of the perils ahead:

Today, one hundred and thirty million Americans keep the day they first set apart.  We all know what Thanksgiving is—it’s turkey day and pumpkin pie day—the day of the meeting of friends and the gathering of families.  It does not belong to any one creed or stock among us, it does not honor any one great man.  It is the whole family’s day when we can all get together, think over the past months a little, feel a sense of harvest, a kinship with our land. It is one of the most secure and friendly of all our feasts.  And yet it was first founded in insecurity, by men who stood up to danger.  And that spirit is still alive.

“The democracy we cherish,” Benét concluded,

is the work of many years and many men.  But as those first men and women first gave thanks, in a dark hour, for the corn that meant life to them, so let us give thanks today—not for the little things of the easy years but for the land we cherish, the way of life we honor, and the freedom we shall maintain.

If it is set aside to cherish land, life, and liberty, Thanksgiving cannot mean a retreat into the home, a shutting of doors and a closing of one’s eyes to the responsibilities that lie beyond the closest circle of relatives and friends: the duties of citizenship and the challenges of living in a global community. Some of the liberties fought for, the life and the land enjoyed in the past are now being threatened; not by foreigners alone, but by those of us who rely on or deal in outmoded constructs, who promote the concept of nation while defying the communal for their own profit.

“There are many days in the year that we celebrate,” Benét remarked, “but this one is wholly of our earth.” Although he might have meant his native ground—his speech being a pep talk to potential soldiers and a rallying cry for the home that soon would turn front—it won’t hurt to misread him, to consider “our earth” to be that truly common ground we share and to reflect on the global crises that may lie ahead and that, if at all, can only be met jointly. I hope we are “still alive” to this “spirit” and am thankful to those who keep on conjuring it.

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What Those Who Remembered Forgot: Robert Altman (1925-2006) on the Air

Well, news is spreading fast these days; and by now anyone within reach of a computer will have learned that film director Robert Altman has died on Monday, 20 November 2006, at the age of 81. Since my own web journal can do little to propagate this message, it will provide instead an addendum to the small number of long-prepared and oft-copied obituaries currently circulating in the blogosphere. I have attempted as much on previous occasions by sharing a lesser known aspect of the careers of Don Knotts, Shelley Winters, and composer Cy Feuer, all of whom had connections to the world of radio to which broadcastellan is largely dedicated. As it turns out, Robert Altman is no exception. Indeed, his debt to the medium was far more profound than that of the other artists aforementioned.

To be sure, Altman’s name is already being closely linked to the so-called golden age of radio by virtue of what would be his last film, A Prairie Home Companion (2006), a filmic realization of a world evoked by radio romancer Garrison Keillor. Altman was greatly influenced by 1940s radio. He revealed as much in a National Public Radio documentary broadcast in May 1995 (a recording of which you may find here). In a tribute to Corwin’s “On a Note of Triumph,” Altman made the following statement:

“Anything I know about drama today comes more from Norman Corwin than anybody. If I had to list my mentors, I would say Norman Corwin, David Lean, Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, and then a countless number of people whose names I forget where I learned what not do.”

Now, what could Altman have learned “about drama” from Corwin, America’s foremost radio playwright (whose first letter to me I cheered recently)? As a film director, Altman did not fare well on the stage. His production of Arthur Miller’s Resurrection Blues earlier this year was widely panned; indeed, the reviews were so unfavorable that, while in London at the time, I decided to pass on it, despite my interest in the career of Miller, a former radio writer (one of whose works I discuss here). Perhaps, what Altman did take from Corwin—and what he could do on film more readily than on a stage—was the idea of an ensemble piece comprised of a large cast, a sprawling drama of many voices (such as The Player and Gosford Park). Everybody‘s in it, you think, when you look at the cast for an Altman production.

The same can be said for the signature pieces written and directed by Norman Corwin—plays with a vast number of characters, their stories intersecting, their voices adding up to something, to an idea, a statement, about Hollywood, for instance, about politics, about the state of American society. Corwin’s seminal On a Note of Triumph was such a piece, a play for voices; not a choir, mind you, but a cacophony; not a traditional drama of linear storytelling, but a fictionalized documentary, a record of a moment. Of this play, Altman said, some fifty years after its initial broadcast: “I can recite 40% of On a Note of Triumph from memory,” having listened to it “time and time again.”

I had not been aware of Altman’s admiration of Corwin’s work, until today. Come to think of it, both Corwin and Altman were belatedly honored at the Academy Awards this year, Altman receiving a lifetime achievement award, and Corwin being the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary about the making of “On a Note of Triumph.” Now, when I watch Altman’s films, I will look for Corwin and “Anything” he might have brought to the craft of the late director.

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Now on the Air: Sam Shepard’s True West

Well, it still does what it has been doing for over eighty years now. If you let it. And on this wet and stormy afternoon, I was ready to let it. Take me to a show, I mean. The radio can do that for you, even today. Drama on the air started out like this, back in the early 1920s: broadcasts right from the Broadway stage. In fact, such home entertainment predates wireless technology. As I discussed here, remote theater-going began in the 1880s by way of the telephone. However grateful for the service, those tuning in to wired or wireless theatricals must have realized right away that something was amiss.

Not being there to see what unfold as the curtain rises makes it difficult to follow all that transpires onstage, especially when characters are speechless or when one responds to the silent actions of another. You cannot hear a hand being raised, a cold shoulder being turned, or a door being opened quietly so as to escape the notice of the characters present.

Obviously, some translations are in order to avoid the chaos of an auditory void. This problem was initially dealt with by an announcer or narrator who filled in the blanks as the action progressed. Soon, however, it became clear that stage plays had to be properly adapted if they were to succeed in the non-visual medium. Carefully reworked, radio adaptations can be both culturally significant and aesthetically satisfying, even though those advocating pure audio drama—plays conceived for the airwaves—deem such efforts at translation inferior or downright detrimental to the of true aural arts.

Yesterday, BBC Radio 3 presented an audio version of Sam Shepard’s dark comedy True West (1980), by now a classic of American drama. The Radio Times heralded this very nearly “True West” as a copy that “could well be the drama of the year.” While that may be an overstatement, the radio adaptation, featuring David Soul in the role of Lee, is certainly an event worth catching. For those ready to grab, the Drama on 3 production by Peter Kavanagh is available online for the entire week; you may listen in (by visiting the BBC’s “Listen Again” page and selecting “Drama on 3”).

It is difficult for me to sit through an eighty-minute radio play. Listening to “True West,” I found myself scrubbing pots and pans, which is something I would not have done (and very rarely do) otherwise. It seems I needed to do something and that listening was not activity enough, as reading most certainly is. After years of studying and taking in radio drama, I still lack the attention span to take in a play I might easily follow in a theater, even if there is as little to see as there is in True West.

It is two brothers engaged in the kind of verbal sparring that makes for good radio drama. One of them is a successful (or at any rate, busy) Hollywood screenwriter, the other a seasoned and desert-hardened crook. They couldn’t be more different, it seems, and at first you can’t help but feel sorry for Austin, the writer, who is so rudely interrupted by his no-good sibling; but, while housesitting for their mother, who is away on a trip, the estranged brothers are forced to brush up on and against each other. In the friction that ensues, the tarnish of the one and the polish of the other rub off, muddling the personae and laying bare the common nature of both, their true insecurities and western discontent.

Soul is excellent as the irascible Lee, even though he sounds rather old for the part (especially when compared to Richard Laing as Austin). He reminded me of the cantankerous Arthur Spooner (Jerry Stiller) on The King of Queens. In fact, the entire play comes across like an extended sitcom episode, rather than a profound comment on the human condition. It also pales somewhat when revisited in the shadow of Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002), which pushes a very similar situation quite a bit further. That said, “True West” is still an outing to stay in for, an evening (or afternoon, or morning) of free theater, if you are at home and aching for such.

Unfortunately, the BBC Radio Player does not allow you to fast-forward, to skim and skip, which is bad news in case you, like me, need one or two (or more) intermissions to take in an audio drama of this length. So, I recorded it on my laptop and listened to it in instalments—theater chopped up for easy digestion and ready review—the True West of Silicon Valley.

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Budd Hulick, the "Man With a Platform"

Well, this would be a perfect day to kick the proverbial bucket, especially one of those in which it has been coming down all day. Most of us seem capable of resisting the impulse, and some wretched creatures are rewarded for their restraint by having to slosh through the muck of life toward senility, whether or not they care to prolong the journey, until they are too fragile to kick at all and waste away ingloriously like an abandoned experiment in resilience. If the Internet Movie Database got it right—and did not merely neglect to keep up with the subject*—one such mortality-resisting mortal might be Budd Hulick, an American radio comedian once known as one of a couple of “gloomchasers.” He was born on this day, 14 November, in 1905.

Hulick was an announcer at station WMAK in Buffalo, New York, where he met his comedy partner, writer-announcer-utility man F. Chase Taylor. Together they became known as Stoopnagle and Budd, an act that sounded fresh and unconventional because the two tossed caution to the wind and did what was generally discouraged on the add-littered airwaves: they ad-libbed.

Indeed, or according to legend, that is just how they got started one October evening in 1930 after a hurricane had caused the network to collapse and CBS affiliates, bereft of their regular transmissions, were temporarily left to send for themselves. Hulick and Budd filled a quarter hour with music and banter, to which impromptu performance the audience responded so favorably that WMAK gave them a regular spot.

While slow to attract a national sponsor, the team proved a popular success on radio in the early to mid-1930s with their show. Together with the big names of vaudeville, wireless and motion pictures, the voices of Stoopnagle and Budd answered the public’s curiosity by appearing alongside W. C. Fields, Rudy Vallée, Burns and Allen, Bela Lugosi, Cab Calloway, and Baby Rose Marie in the Paramount comedy revue International House (1933).

After Stoopnagle and Budd split in 1937, Hulick carried on as a radio quiz show host. It was another unforeseen advent—always dreaded in the big business of unseen entertainment—that turned Hulick into “A Man With a Platform,” the title character of a “musicomedy” by America’s foremost radio playwright, Norman Corwin. Corwin had written this piece “expressly” for Henry Morgan, a caustic radio wit who apparently got his dates mixed up, as the author-director reasoned in his notes on the play, which was broadcast on 2 November 1941. Corwin “quickly revamped the show to accommodate the sly and ingratiating comedy of Budd Hulick.”

As “A Man With a Platform,” Hulick played a know-it-all of the kind we all know: some nobody who thinks that “things should be done about things.” The character sounds familiar today, considering that most people who keep a blog such as this step on the old soap box once in a while (or frequently, even) to advocate and accuse, to bemoan and belittle. We all grab this virtual microphone to voice what we feel passionate about, even though we may be opining without sound argument, in the face of facts we dare others to face.

Mounting his platform, Hulick gets to go on about the inanity of baby talk (as if responding to the phenomenon of the “mommy blogs”) and the need for changes in public education, however questionable his suggestions. Not in favor of “singing the praise of unsung heroes,” the “Man” proposes a “dishonor system,” singling out those “whose annoyance to the public takes the form of chronic overeager optimism” (as if speaking of those who maintain that the war on terror is going well). He even gets to meddle with established broadcasting practices (something that web journalists are wont to do, simply by insisting on doing things their way).

I was glad to have learned about Hulick’s 101st birthday when, rather listless and unsure whether to write anything at all today, I sauntered over to the IMDb, and, after consulting the invaluable GOLDINdex, dug out a recording of Corwin’s play. The “Man” was just the kind of gloomchaser I needed on this miserable November afternoon; indeed, it made me rethink my remarks about kicking the bucket, being that Corwin is still kicking at 96.

*The date of Hulick’s departure has since then been added to the IMDb entry

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On This Day in 1950: The Man to Whom My Dog Owes His Name Makes His Magnificent Debut

Well, this takes me back. All the way to May 2005, when I made up my mind at last and set out to keep the broadcastellan journal. Apprehensive about disclosing my true identity (the name my parents pinned on me), I entered the blogosphere with the fanciful moniker “The Magnificent Montague.” It took me about five months to shove that nominal cloak into the closet and leap out, as it were, in the buff (or as near to that natural state as my virtual modesty permits). Some five months ago, I once again reached for that retired garment and passed it on to my dog. Such an act of questionable charity would doubtless have infuriated the original bearer of said name, who, on this day, 10 November, in 1950, made his radio debut in a sitcom aptly titled The Magnificent Montague.

Truth be told, I’ve got a thing for Monty Woolley, the man who played him. If he were The Man Who Came to Dinner—and if I did not already have both the man and the machine for the job—I might almost stoop to doing the dishes. Mr. Woolley was, of course, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and a lot of other compelling characters besides. Over the years, I’ve seen him in films like Midnight, Since You Went Away, As Young As You Feel, and the delightful if lesser known Molly and Me (opposite Gracie Fields). He also did a bit of campaigning for Roosevelt in 1944, as I found out when I heard him in a line-up of FDR supporters in a recently discussed radio special. Now, Mr. Woolley could almost talk me into anything—and talk he did. His voice was such an integral part of his persona—prickly, pompous, and proud—that it is not surprising he was talked into playing that sort of man in a weekly sitcom written for radio.

His is a beard you could hear on the air. I mean, Woolley was such an iconic figure in American culture that those tuning in did not require a picture. They knew exactly what Woolley looked like—and there was no need to create a new look for Edwin Montague, the character he portrayed. Montague and Woolley were one; or, let’s say that Montague was so ideally suited to the Woolley persona that it was easy to confuse the star and his role. One was an extensions of the other, so that Montague seemed at once caricature and lifelike portrait, as flat and vivid as a Dickensian character, a Mr. Pecksniff or Pickwick or Turveydrop.

Written and produced by Nat Hiken (who had previously worked for comedians Fred Allen and Milton Berle), The Magnificent Montague cast Woolley as an accomplished Shakespearean actor who, luckless of late (indeed, for nearly a decade), accepts a role in a sentimental daytime radio serial. However disdainful, the venerable thespian charms millions of listeners as Uncle Goodheart, a popular success he is anxious to keep from the members of the Proscenium Club who would be offended by such a shameful act of selling out.

It is a perfect setup for a radio sitcom, considering that broadcasting was generally frowned upon by serious or distinguished actors . . . unless, that is, they realized how much money there was to be made and how comparatively easy it was to make it. The Magnificent Montague was radio’s way of ridiculing highbrow culture, of deriding those who dismissed it as vulgar or trivial but were nonetheless envious of its tremendous pull.

In the 1950s, radio was no longer the live medium it had been prior to the development and widespread use of magnetic tape; for the most part, dramatic programs were being recorded for later broadcast, which meant greater flexibility and fewer scheduling conflicts for performers who would otherwise not have committed to a weekly series. Some of the great names in film and theater—Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, James Stewart, and Laurence Olivier among them—pulled an “Uncle Goodheart” during those days by becoming radio regulars (rather than being special guests whenever there was some promoting to be done).

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The Man in "The Open Boat": Stephen Crane, War Correspondent

I’m happy to report that he is back.  Not that I had time to report the incidence.  This afternoon, Montague, our Jack Russell terrier, snuck through the seasonally thinned hedge and, driven by the promises of chicken and cows in the cool air, dashed off into the field—for which offense, any farmer has the right to shoot him. It seems that my responsibility toward the imp “has not created in [him] a sense of obligation.” I don’t mean to break his spirit; but I am trying hard to counter his instincts, especially those laws of nature that run counter to the ones we make for (or against) ourselves and others.

Instincts, spirit, laws of nature. That takes me to the anniversary I meant to celebrate: the birth of Stephen Crane, journalist, short-story writer and novelist who emerged from his mother’s busy womb (he was one of fourteen) on this day, 1 November, in 1871. Crane died before he reached his thirtieth year; but along the way he turned in his reports, turning out stories about ordinary people in extraordinary situations. One of which, “The Open Boat” was, in turn, adapted for radio. Dramatized by E. Jack Newman for the adventure-thriller series Escape, “The Open Boat” was tossed into the airwaves on 19 July 1953.

Somber, stark and unsentimental, it is a story of survival, a realist’s story of a small community of men exposed to the elements and realizing just how little they seem to matter beyond the confines of the dinghy in which they find themselves. Far from naturalist or objective, these observations are served with—and are in the service of—irony, conveying a lesson brought home with somewhat greater economy by Crane’s equally famous poem:

A man said to the universe:
“Sir I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

Escape artist Newman clearly had a sense of obligation toward Crane’s universe; the changes to the original are numerous, but do little harm to the “Boat.” Adaptations are often less than subtle in their hacking and rehashing; as such, they are questionable, indeed objectionable, to someone who, like me, studied, taught and respects such works, someone eager to attack those chomping at them like a dog would a herd of cows indifferent to what he assumes to be his domain. It should be gratifying, then, to come across a dramatization that preserves Crane’s prose, at times word for word, aside from a few mild curses the radio censors would not allow even in the name of fidelity. Yet perhaps one can be rather too faithful and thus overly timid in one’s approach to adapting literature.

Had Newman been less duteous, for instance, he might have turned “The Open Boat” back into the report as which it first reached the American public on 7 January 1897. After all, it was Crane himself who, along with three others, was aboard that dinghy. “Based on a true story.” I guess I owe it to the folks running the Lifetime channel that I have grown suspicious of any drama thrust at me with such a preface. Why should such a label do so much (if not all of) the creative work, readily applied to render even an artistically negligible production significant? To blame for this practice is the old and rather tired pitting of fact against fiction, in which the latter is too often looked upon as the inferior or spurious offspring of the former.

Crane prefixed his story with a similar label, reapplied by Newman; but its authenticity, a sense of witnessing and partaking, can be impressed on its audience otherwise, in a reportorial style as only radio can bring it to storytelling. To achieve this, the narrator might recall the incident in the first person of Crane himself, the correspondent aboard the arms-carrying Commodore, sunk on 2 January, in 1897, on its way to Cuba. It would have accounted for the narrating voice (of William Conrad, in Newman’s dramatization) and added urgency to the account. It would return the story to its author in the very act of taking it from him and taking liberties with it.

Were I to rework Crane’s narrative, I might even refresh its irony by alluding to the current debate on global ecology, on the boat we’re all in, facing nature that is neither “cruel, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise,” but “indifferent, flatly indifferent” to our insistence on governing it, a seemingly tamed, domesticated environment turning on us like a cur. Translators, as they say, are traitors; but those who simply repeat words without making them worth your while, without making them work for you by making your mind work with them, are traders in spoiled goods. Indeed, by not investing anew in a seemingly old boat, they betray the very nature of literature as a vessel of shared ideas.

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On This Day in 1947: Havoc in "Subway" Gives Commuters Ideas

Well, if you’re on the edge, you’d better not take the subway and stand next to someone who has the job you want, wants the partner you have, and won’t stop yapping about her career and the lucky breaks she’s had. You’d better hold on to the strap and, crowds permitting, take a deep breath—especially if you got a sharp pair of scissors in your bag. “Idea and scissors. Scissors . . . and idea!” That’s what the down-on-her-luck Paula has running through her mind in a Suspense play titled “Subway,” which aired on this day, 30 October, in 1947.

The leading role in this thriller is played by June Havoc, who happened to be the wife of Suspense producer William Spier (both pictured above). A few years after teaming up for this broadcast, Spier directed Havoc in the motion picture A Lady Possessed (1952), which pretty much sums up the driven yet frustrated Paula, the central character riding this New York City “Subway.”

While somewhat overpowering at first, the sound effects transported me back to the underbelly of the city. I thought of my commutes from Manhattan to the Bronx and back, or to wherever I was studying and working at the time. Having been squeezed in and shoved by the “five-o’clock mob,” as Paula calls her fellow straphangers, it is easy to sympathize with someone who suddenly “hated everybody” and “felt like committing murder.” She certainly has reason to resent Ruth, the woman next to her, who insists on unfolding her success story at a time when Paula’s career has pretty much folded. Scissors, please!

Perhaps someone ought to have handed a pair to veteran radio playwright Mel Dinelli, co-writer of “Subway.” The set-up, certainly, is well suited to a twenty-minute thrill ride on the airwaves, especially to the noirish psycho-dramas in which Suspense excelled after the departure of puzzle-crafter John Dickson Carr (previously mentioned here). A character sketch, narrated in the first person, that revolves around a possible turning point in that person’s life, a moment demanding quick decisions and swift action. “Idea and scissors.” Will the two meet so that Paula might get her break, taking over for Ruth, as suggested by this none-too-bright former rival? Or will Paula cut her losses and run off empty-handed? It’s all a matter of minutes. Why, Paula marvels, “I wouldn’t even be late for supper!”

Dinelli dealt with such a tense instant and the instincts it triggers very successfully in thrillers like “To Find Help,” a Suspense play he reworked into Beware, My Lovely, a motion picture starring Ida Lupino. Here, however, the survival drama is given a rather more ambitious treatment, as the protagonist’s drives—her desire to be Ruth-less—are being met by her conscience, the consideration that even strangers on a train, even those she thinks of as “an obstruction to be cleared away for something more important,” are part of a grandly designed human fabric her scissors are poised to slice and destroy. It is an awakening that, in order to ring true or convince, requires a finer tuning than the crude but effective formula devised for Suspense, the will she/won’t she scenario that, in order to sustain tension, pushes the moral issue of such an epiphany to the edge, where it is in danger of falling flat instead of rising to the occasion of being uplifting. Hearing about someone regaining self-control is decidedly less thrilling than listening to the unravelling of nerves.

“Subway” is a troubled ride of a domesticated Wild West show in which the law of the gun has become a split decision for scissors. The frustrated Paula stands in for the women in post-WWII America whose careers have been cut short by a return to the ostensibly normal; women who were pushed back into kitchen and nursery, away from the promises of assuming center stage among men, overshadowed by the ordinary and outdone by opportunists fighting with weapons fit for man-hunt or matrimony; women who were expected to keep their ambitions and their anger in check.

What are the rewards for patience and sacrifice in a post-war society reclaiming its entrepreneurial edge with a vengeance? While not as suggestive as that most famous of all radio plays to air on this day, “The War of the Worlds,” “Subway” might have given a few commuters ideas about running with scissors.

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Dylan Thomas, the Man Who Sounded Dreams

To “begin at the beginning”: 27 October 1914. Birth of Dylan Thomas, the poet who put the town of Llareggub on the map—an imaginary, sound-wrought community whose Welsh enough sounding name takes on an everyday crudeness when reflected upon in the mirror, a curse of the visual that the ear does not appreciate. Nor could it have been uttered on national radio back in the late 1940s, when Thomas began to work on the play that would, after years of revisions, become “Under Milk Wood.” Yet it is far from muted, this “Play for Voices,” which eventually went on the air in January 1954, just weeks after Thomas’s binge drinking-induced death in New York City.

“To begin at the beginning.” It is with this sound plan of action that Thomas’s narrator ushers us into the world of “Under Milk Wood,” a fourth-dimensional non-space, the anti-matter of a dreamscape unfolding in time. Listen, and you “can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing. Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep. And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-before-dawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea [. . .].”

“Time passes. Listen. Time passes,” we are reminded. “Come closer now,” the voice beckons. “Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colors and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despair and big seas of their dreams.” It is an irresistible invitation, this: to close ones eyes and conceive of imaginings beyond images. “Under Milk Wood” is a play unfit to be seen.

It certainly wasn’t suited for the big screen, as I found out in my attempt to celebrate the anniversary of Thomas’s birth this evening. I rarely shut down the projector before a film has flickered out; but I was grateful to a friend of ours who interrupted Andrew Sinclair’s 1972 adaptation, a tawdry spectacle of ill-conceived literal-mindedness. Starring Burton and featuring Elizabeth Taylor, the film shows us horses and cats and false teeth in a glass whenever Thomas speaks of them (and “cocklewomen” at work when he tells us they are sleeping). It offers visuals for visions, a prosaic fidelity that is the very death of poetry.

I decided not to pick up where we had left off. Instead, I’ll turn down the lights and listen to the 1954 radio version (also narrated by Burton). I might drift off; but I will let it happen and even will this mingling of dreams, allowing Thomas’s word-made world to stream in and out of my consciousness, catching his redolent names and hyphenate-strung metaphors only to let them sink in the “black, dab-filled sea” amid the coasting boats of my unguarded thoughts.

For years, while researching my study on so-called old-time radio, I have been resentful of Thomas’s reputation among the radio dramatists. It irks me still that so much attention is being paid to this one piece, a zooming in on Llareggub that did not lead to a sustained effort in charting radio’s vast and varied soundscapes or to a widespread awareness of radio as a poetic medium. “Under Milk Wood” has been singled out and set apart as literature, glorified at the expense of a great number of unheralded and silenced performances.

Tonight, I am going to stifle this resentment—an anger rightly aimed at blinkered critics, not at the poet at play—and slide between the eyelids of Thomas’s dreamers to ease my way into that town made of time, a town made by those taking a moment, and by them only.

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Wire(less): When Radio Answers the Phone

Well, it only took about five months, but, taking a break from the broadcastellan journal last night, I finally completed my fourth podcast. Titled “The Voice on the Wire,” it explores the relationship between radio and telephone. Its publication coincides with two BBC Radio 4 broadcasts, one documenting the history of radio sound effects (“Two Coconut Shells, a Blow Lamp and a Raspberry”), the other (“Down the Wires”) the development of the Electrophone, an early device for taking in theater over the telephone. I will discuss those two programs later this week; but today I’ll simply play the barker and do a bit of self-promoting:

Step inside, folks, step inside! This way to the big show. That’s your mind, ladies and gentleman, or at least it can be, with pulp-peddlers like me around to give you strange ideas. Be there when an invalid is strangled in her bed; listen to the disembodied voice of a man in the act of committing suicide, and witness assorted cases of murder, mayhem, and madness. Get your wires double-crossed here, folks! You’ll come across the most tremendous and terrifying tales of treacherous telephony. You’ve never heard such smooth operators, such neurotic callers. Busy signals, freak connections, hang-ups and heavy breathing—we’ve got it all. There’s nothing like a case of espionage and betrayal, of lines that go click in the night, of outcasts and shut-ins whose lives are being cut as short as an inconvenient call . . . as long as you are not at the receiving end.

I’ve gone on about thrillers like “Sorry, Wrong Number,” “Meridian 7-1212,” and “Long Distance” at some length in my doctoral study; unlike Roland Barthes, I find it easy to go on about what I love. It’s an even greater thrill to let radio speak for itself, to tune in and sample various melodramas from series including Inner Sanctum Mysteries, Suspense, The Whistler and Radio City Playhouse, and to put together this collage of telephone terror.

While it is the most famous of all plays written for American radio (“The War of the Worlds” being an adaptation, however innovative and radical), “Sorry, Wrong Number”—dubbed “radio’s perfect script”—was only one in a long line of audio dramas that took up the receiver and took it on by shouting across the wire, that means of point-to-point communication for the triumph over which the wireless was originally developed.

For decades, it was the wire that remained triumphant. In the 21st century, this failure has been rectified and “wireless,” an almost forgotten word in the early 1990s, now means both the intimate chat between two individuals and the broadcasting (or podcasting) of voices to the multitude. Still, whenever I see a sign saying “wireless”—and despite the fact that I am using such a network at home and, if lucky, on my travels—I still think of the old cat’s whiskers and the behemoth of a mass medium into which it had transmogrified by the 1930s—a culture of pre-internet voicecasting and sound-snatching turned into a one way operation and forced into commercial service.

As I argue, radio anathematized telephone as the anti-wireless, and for good reasons. Heard on an experimental program that glorified the sound medium and its potentialities, a play like “Meridian 7-1212” demonstrated how private talk, unlike public speech—once it was tele-communicated rather than delivered face to face—promoted selfishness and enabled sinister deeds. Pointing up the failures and dangers of telephonic exchanges, the radio, which has been accused of being a fascist medium, emphasized the public service it rendered by bringing and keeping a people together and glossing over or making a joke of differences, tasks of great importance during economic crises (as confronted in the 1930s) and war (from World War II and Korea to the installation of Russia as the new enemy to beat).

I rarely use the phone these days; and cellular ones are largely a nuisance or a mystery to me. I can manage to keep my appointments—and my distance—without them; but perhaps it was listening to all these tales of terror that convinced me to twist radio’s dial instead of running the risk of dialing wrong numbers.