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On This Day in 1949: At Quip’s End, Wireless Wit Calls It Quits

Well, I’ll probably laugh about it—eventually. Not a day in my life passes without mishaps, some major, some trivial, all vexing. Sure, I could blame it now on Montague, our new canine companion. After all, dogs are expected to be inept, to be indifferent to our technological comforts and headaches; but a few remaining bristles on that scouring brush called conscience go against the grain of my indolence and continue to tickle until I make a clean breast of it. The “it,” this time around, is a cordless phone plunged into the watery grave of a bathtub. The rest, as they say (in Hamlet) is silence.

I won’t be silent about the quietus of one of the great American radio comedians whose program left the air on this day, 26 June, in 1949. The comedian in question is Fred Allen, a mediocre juggler who discovered that playing with words attracted a larger audience. That is, until the quiz and giveaway craze of the late 1940s revealed the greed and idiocy of a public that was eager to leave radio behind for the promises of a few bucks, some gifts, and a little flickering picture in a box of tubes and wires.

Fred Allen was a satirist. Whereas Jack Benny relied on situational humor, Allen relished in timely wit. Benny got people to laugh by making a fool of himself on our behalf. His age, his musical shortcomings, his vanity and tightfistedness—they were as hilarious as they were endearing. Rival Allen, on the other hand, made fun of all and sundry. He was the court jester in the living room, sending up what got listeners down: New Deal bureaucracy, wartime rationing, postwar housing shortage—anything fit for banter in Allen’s Alley.

That Alley was Allen’s finest piece of airwaves architecture. It was just the airway to vent anger and open up debate. How unfortunate that, in his final months on the air, Allen stooped to driving around that lane—a broader and less angular Alley called Main Street—in a Ford vehicle, in keeping with the demands of his new sponsor and the greed rampant after years of sacrifice. It wasn’t television that ended Allen’s career, even though, as critics insisted, he had no face for it. That he had no voice for radio did not prevent him from excelling in that medium. It was commerce, plain and simple.

The sponsors kept giving him a tough time, demanding cuts or cutting him off. The giveaway programs cut him to the quick; he was smarting from the audience’s lack of loyalty. It was just a phase; but Allen, plagued by poor health, did not wait for it to end. On the final program, Portland Hoffa started things off “with a laugh” by telling a few intentionally corny jokes and supplying the laughter herself. “If I can keep up this pace, I’ll end up with my own program,” Hoffa declared. “The way radio is going, that is quite possible,” her husband retorted. It was Allen having the last laugh at the age of canned cheer. It was the gallows humor of a man at wit’s end.

There were jokes, too, about Milton Berle, the epitome of television humor, comedy that translated sharp lines into slips and gaffes, allusions into grimaces, and travesty into cross dressing. True, television could deliver verbal jokes—but it had to justify the image, however grainy or ghostly at first. An old vaudevillian who learned to tell jokes when his juggling hands failed to do the trick, Allen was not a lad of Berlesque. He made some attempts, as Alan Havig noted, but none succeeded, just as his film career had flopped while Benny and Hope stayed afloat.

On his last program, Allen confronted wit and humor by pairing fellow satirist Henry Morgan with humor triumphant—none other than Benny, the fall guy who would be back in the fall. Having overspent by buying into the installment plan scheme, Morgan, “flatter than something that has been stepped on,” is forced to go to a pawnshop. There, he is greeted by Benny, the broker, proudly showing off his cool, green vault and counting whatever money was coming his way. As it turns out, Benny was also the shyster whose loan got Morgan still deeper into his financial fix.

It paid to adjust, this final sketch suggested; and pinning your hopes on a medium that was being abandoned, as Allen put it in Treadmill to Oblivion, like the “bones at a barbecue” was no picnic. It’s no good to be good at something if it’s something the many no longer cares about. It’s the death sentence under the law of supply and demand. I know. I’ve been staring at that noose for years.

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Old-time Radio Primer: H Stands for Hiatus

Well, how are you feeling today? According to one British study, 23 June is the happiest day of the year. Montague and I were perfectly content, playing and dozing in the garden and going for walks along the lane. Perhaps, the folks down in the nearby town of Aberystwyth were even happier last Tuesday, when they had several thousand pounds thrown at them on the street by a stranger who just wanted to “spread a little sunshine.”  Apparently, this local story had already travelled around the world (both my sister and my best friend in Germany had heard of it) before it came to my ears, which, no doubt, were too busy picking up the sounds of .

As grateful as I am for ready access and instant replay, recording technology can render our present-day listening quite unlike the experience of tuning in back then. It is difficult to get a sense of a weekly broadcasting schedule, of certain parts of the day being associated with particular programs, of the anticipation of their airing and the space such periodically scheduled events occupied in the minds of the audience in the interim.

To be sure, the middle of June would have been meant a rather prolonged wait for the next tune-in opportunity. It was during this month (rather than May, as on US television nowadays) that most of the crowd-pleasing drama series and comedy-variety shows went on their summer hiatus. Hiatus, from the Latin hiare, meaning “to yawn.”

As I suggested a while ago, the off-season in radio had initially been a response to technical difficulties of broadcasting during the long, bright days of the year. Now, a hiatus can be a precarious wait, which is why I’d never attempt one for broadcastellan. The question is: will the audience greet the news of your return with excitement, or a resounding yawn? That is, will your show go on even in its absence, circulating in the minds of the multitude? Not, perhaps, if your season finale is as disastrous as the second one of Desperate Housewives.

To be sure, broadcasters did not shut down the microphones and close the studios for the duration. Before resorting to reruns, which became customary in the 1950s, they scheduled replacement programs, some of which, like the Forecast series, were designed to test the potential of untried fare. It wasn’t all filler during those summer months. The Mercury Theater, for instance, was first heard in July 1938. Besides, a prestigious timeslot, one occupied by the Lux Radio Theatre demanded high-profile or at least adequate replacements. One of the most highly regarded programs to have its premiere during the summer was the thriller anthology Escape.

On this day, 23 June, in 1950, Escape offered the western melodrama “Sundown,” the “story of a boy who never owned anything . . . but a gun.” The cast was headed by Barton Yarborough, best remembered today for his portrayal of Texan daredevil Doc Long in Carlton E. Morse’s I Love a Mystery serial. Doc and his pals did not break for the summer; they kept audiences suspended, from one cliffhanger to the next. On the very day Yarborough was heard in “Sundown,” another Doc Long (played by Jim Boles) set out for a new adventure in “The Snake with the Diamond Eyes.”

There was time as well for summer schooling. On this day in 1957, Edward R. Murrow introduced the listeners of the CBS Radio Workshop to a word far more ominous than “hiatus,” precisely because it denotes a lingering presence:

A new word has been added to our ever increasing vocabulary.  It’s a small word, dressed in fear.  To pronounce, not very difficult.  To envision, staggering.  This scientific word may well become the most important in all languages and to all peoples. It is pronounced “fallout.” “Fallout.”  Rather a simple word to describe so much.  “Fallout.”  Radiation withheld by quantities of atmosphere that may eventually descend to pillage, burn, kill not only you and me, but the scores of generations unborn.  Quite a word, “fallout.”

Countering the politics of terror, Murrow suggested that this lexical novelty could also denote the harvest of knowledge, as “words, thoughts, ideas,” withheld in an “atmosphere of ignorance,” eventually descend on future generations. Perhaps, this intellectual fallout is rather too gradual and the radiation too slight. With atomic energy once again on the political agenda in Britain, and threats of nuclear warfare not quite a thing of the past, little seems to have been learned from past horrors.

I wish political leaders could be forced to go on hiatus to make room for summer replacements—especially since some of them seem as perverse as that ill-treated teenager in Escape, seeking retribution beyond reason in an atmosphere of fear and its inevitable fallout. To the restless mind, “hiatus” can mean “pause for thought.”

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They Call Me Montague; or, A Question of Naming

Well, this is our new companion. Earlier today, we picked him up from a farm in South Wales where he had been in foster care after his original keepers (a family falling apart) had handed him over to a charity. I decided to call him Montague, or Monty, after Monty Woolley and his radio character, the Magnificent Montague—irascible, swellheaded, and hopelessly demoted. Now, “Montague” used to be my nom de blog as well; so, I’m only passing it on to the little one now resting next to me.

Will Montague grow into his name? Will he defy it or make it his own, after having been confronted, pell mell, with such an appellation? As yet, he barely responds when thus addressed. After all, until a few hours ago, he used to go by another name.

The act of naming and the meaning of names, the study of which is called onomastics (since every field of scholarly investigation must have a title validating it as such), has always fascinated me. As a child, I sensed naming to be a decided gesture of ownership, an announcement of having brought into being—that is, brought into my life—something that, before I laid claim to it thus definitively, had been vague, obscure or utterly unknown to me.

After I had named the toys in my room, I began to name the fictional characters I drew or wrote about. Could I make up my own life in this arbitrary, willful way, despite being stuck with a name for life? Somehow, I thought the answer must be a resounding “no.” I had already been claimed by others.

My interest in names and naming only intensified when I read the works of Charles Dickens, who had a knack for the game of the name: proper nouns that might not be proper at all, but that keep you wondering, that arouse your suspicion, that conjure up a face in a few syllables. In an essay on the subject, I called this quality in Dickens “Onomancy”—the act of conjuring up the spirit of a character by virtue of a moniker. It is a game in which the reader is invited to guess whether nomen truly is omen.

In Dickens’s Little Dorrit, for instance, you will encounter a rich assortment of suggestive surnames, such as Plornish, Flintwinch, or Stiltstalking, and sobriquets such as Pet, Tip, or Altro. It has its mispronounced names (Biraud for Rigaud, Cavallooro for Cavalletto) and its unpronounced names (A. B., P. Q., and X. Y.). It has its aptonyms (Messrs. Peddle and Pool, solicitors) and eponyms (Barnacleism); its cognominal chameleon (Rigaud, alias Blandois, alias Lagnier) and its renamed renegade (Harriet Beadle, alias Hattey, alias Tattycoram); its allegoric Everyman (Bishop, Bar, or Bench) and its Nobody. After all, it is a story about losing and regaining a reputation—a story of how to make a name a good one.

In old-time radio drama, names were rarely quite this fanciful—but they were called out and repeated far more often than in everyday life. The creators of such plays assumed, and wrongly—that names, heard only once, would not sink in; that it would be confusing for the listener to discern just who was talking to whom. To be sure, some producers, like the Hummerts, went rather too far with such designations; but perhaps this is why Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, managed to make such a name for himself, despite the fact that he was dull as . . . , well, let’s not start with the name calling.

As tempting as it might be, there won’t be any mention of names in the radio play I am currently imagining. The listener will have to distinguish between no more than two main characters, individuals who are nothing to one another. Their personalities won’t be pronounced by mere proper nouns; instead, they have to speak for themselves. That is, I have to put words into their mouths first—if Montague, wild and woolly, will permit me to divert my attention. The named one, you see, has already laid claim to me.

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Being Gertrude Stein; or, A Matter of Diction

I have done my share of posing and fitting. Of donning hats and slipping into outfits however ill suited. Metaphors—and all language is metaphor—are the garment of thought, whether designed to conceal or disclose, to beguile or render plain. To me, dressing up for the occasion has often been a problem. I am prone to contra-diction, to making my voice stand out and draw attention to itself like a garish tie on a white shirt. “Now that tie makes a statement,” one of my professors once told me, looking at the bit of silk dangling from my neck. He never said what that statement might be.

Now that I am dabbling in radio playwriting, I try to be less flippant and flashy with my words. They are not mine, after all, but belong to my characters. There are two of them; two, not counting the unheard speaker on the telephone and the one-line walk-on who serves chiefly as a framing device, a voice suggesting that the story will repeat itself. I want the two main characters to come across as real, although they might not be flesh and blood even as fictional beings. A slip in diction might rip their dress and expose the unsure hand of the designer. That would be me. And it would be a mistake. One being at times a synonym for the other.

Now, my own voice, which I created for myself, the voice I am using here—and which may be entirely unsuited for the purpose of blogging—must not enter the drama I am creating. I must bring two beings to life and show up their differences. It matters that they are unalike. You should be able to hear that they can never see eye to eye. So, to shed my own diction and slip into theirs, I reminded myself of an exercise I was given in a course on literary theory. I was asked to take on the voice of Gertrude Stein. It was my chance to rid myself of the nagging voice of Thomas Carlyle (pictured) and his famous philosophy of clothes.

I realized that, rather than imitating Stein, I found, through her, a new voice of such minimalism and repetitiveness that it forced me to expose my innermost thoughts. For once, my language was baring all, even though it seemed like a coat, a fabric of code. Here is a moment of that performance, the sharing of which is nearly as difficult as its composition:

Being Curious Fire. That was a moment being curious and that there being a curious man looking was being a curious moment. That was a moment being a curious moment being that that there was that curious looking man being a slow walking curious looking man. That was curious. That moment there was that snow coldness. That moment there was that loneliness cotton warm only. And not that moment only. That was New York and being there and being there only strolling and strolling and strolling there was that loneliness and that being curious being quite worn off. there was that snow coldness and nowhere to go. And then there was posing. That moment there was that longing and looking and that boybeing when being curious only can be a fire and when only being curious can be a fire. Being can be a curious fire and a curious fire can be warming any one in snow coldness. Being before a curious looking man and never before can be warming. Being before a curious looking man being quite curious and quite pointing can be warming. That man was pointing. There was that curious looking man pointing and there was that moment and that never-beforeness and that boybeingness and that coldness and that nowhere-to-goness. At that moment pointing was appointing. At that moment there was that looking at ring fingers. Only that does not always follow. The door was being open for a moment. There was that moment. There was that being curious and not joining. There was that fire and there was that man and this man reposing and that boybeingness broken. There was that shaming finger pointing and that curious looking man quite old and quite lonely and shaking. There was an opening and there was no going. There was pointing and pointing and pointing. And being not joining. That was a man of no moment and no moment counting. Only knowing this does not follow. The only moment counting was before that. Only now the curious fire was no more and being quite out and the one going quite without. Being outside can be a curious fire. Inside being a furious choir. And hollow.

Now it is time to dress up my two characters. I hope the clothes still fit. The picture above, by the way, was taken on my pilgrimage to Carlyle House last year. The old Scotsman is not done with me yet.

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The Anarchy of Silence: Being Absent/Absent Being

Well, what does it suggest? My silence, I mean. Is it a sign of indifference or an exercise in difference? Does it bespeak failure or betoken activity elsewhere? Does it spell death, metaphoric or otherwise? Mind you, I have merely extended my customary weekend retreat from the blogosphere for a single day; and, such is the nature or curse of keeping a public journal—of being nobody to anyone—it may have gone virtually unnoticed. My absence, after all, is no more eloquent than your silence. It requires your presence to come into being.

The house is quiet once more. It resounds with absence. After a weekend of entertaining and sight-seeing, of silent film (with our house guest, Neil Brand, accompanying Buster Keaton’s Cops and The General at the local university’s Arts Center) and talks about radio drama in the still of a summer garden halfway up in the Welsh hills, I alone remained behind.

It is quiet, but never quite silent. There is the storm, rain lashing against the pane of the window, winds strong enough to make the walls of my room shiver. There were the shouts of “goal” on the television earlier today, as even I could not keep myself from having a peek at the World Cup goings-on. There were a few phone calls. There was a moment of reflection on the career of director Vincent The Damned Don’t Cry Sherman, who died last Sunday at the age of 99. And then there was my own voice, reading aloud the lines I have been writing. Yes, I have been writing.

As announced, I have begun anew to write a play. I decided upon a ghost story, a story of absence and presence—the very presence of absence. After looking at various scraps, jotted down ideas for radio plays, I kept in mind what I hinted at in my recent remarks about sound effects. I have used a problem in sound as the starting point for aural play. I won’t relate here and now just what the play is about, lest it should not come about after all if thus prematurely released. It will have to suffice that it features a disembodied voice, imagined sounds, and an improbable architecture. Echoes of that tower I mentioned previously.

In all this, the play is hardly experimental. It is a rather plain story; but one that insist on being told on the air, rather than any other medium. It aims at conveying a mood, at casting suspicion on the speakers, a shadow of doubt cast by the sounds and silence they make. Yes, they “make silence.” Too often we think of silence as being nothing, even though we insist on it being golden by virtue of its rarity. It is glorified as much as it is dreaded. It is a malevolent deity that renders us speechless by holding its tongue.

Now, in old-time radio, silence was anathema. It was not deemed golden enough to fill time on the air, time set aside to fill the coffers of the sponsors. It was dreaded, all right; but tunes and talk and sound effects trickery were let loose upon it to assure its sound defeat.

As Charles Addams suggests in the above visualization of the shrieks, shots, and thuds—the sound and the fury—of 1940s radio thrillers, silence was rarely called upon to make that difference, to speak of promises or signal impending doom. It was talked to death and yet survived in my favorite chapter of Carlton E. Morse’s “The Thing That Cries in the Night,” a noisy serial thriller that confronted a soldier of fortune with a silent and invisible adversary (which I discussed here at length)). If a speaker confronts an uncertain someone without getting a response, does the silence mean the certain absence of the addressee? Or is it a mark of the listener’s defiance? The anarchy of the unseen unheard!

I am hoping to create such uncertainties in my play—a mystery that depends to some degree on the listener’s picking up of a prominently dangled clew. If it goes unnoticed, the revelation might yield a moment of surprise; if it is perceived by the audience before the character in the play catches on, there may come into being a prolonged thrill of suspense. Radio is the very medium for such turns of the screw.

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Old-time Radio Primer: G Stands for Gravel Box and Glass Crasher

Well, where to begin? Picture this, if you will. You decided to write a play that will never be seen; a play that will be imagined rather than staged; a play that will be taken in as sound alone. In short, something—some immaterial thing—that used to be called radio drama. Audio drama will suffice as a name for it, even though other, more grandiose terms have been suggested. Having studied the history of such performances for years, I might as well try my hands, my ears, and my mind at them. The question remains; where to begin?

This is what I am pondering as I sit here in the relative still of our garden, where life plays itself out in a display of colors, a cool breeze and the rays of the sun stroking my bare skin, and (to borrow from Tennyson) the air stirring to the “murmur of innumerable bees.” Now, audio plays can conjure any number of concrete images and intimate sensations; they may trigger memories of feelings—or desires for them—and thus bring them about. Audio drama. It is certainly not all sound.

Yet sound is the non-matter with which to do the conjuring. And to me, audio play has to be about sound and of sound, rather than a verbal exchange place, sequences of lines uttered and interrupted or augmented by non-verbal noise and moments of silence. I don’t hold with those critics who think of radio drama primarily as an oral medium. It is, more inclusively, aural.

Too often sounds have been relegated to the business of supporting a drama unfolding as dialogue or narration—of setting scenes, creating backdrops, or, at best, enhancing its atmosphere. The sounds of opening or closing doors, for instance, create the space in which characters are heard to move, as do those steps on rocks-strewn earth produced by sound(wo)man playing in the “gravel box.”

A gravel box, you see, is a container filled with pebbles, a box which used to simulate the ground on which the dramatis personae of the air were heard to tread. Are bodies immaterial without such sandbox sounds? Or does it suffice, after all, to rely on the voice box alone.

Then there are in radio dramatics those stirring noises of shots and sirens, crashing waves or smashed windows. There is the glass crasher, for example, which, as the name suggests, is a device used for creating the sound of breaking glass. G, in this entry in my old-time radio primer, does not stand for gadget or gimmick.

Sounds have a life beyond live support, beyond adding color or concrete markers of space, which merely enhance what is often already expressed in words: “Don’t you just love the ocean?” (biz: sound of waves); “Isn’t it romantic out here in under the stars?” (cue the crickets); “What are you pointing that gun at me for, you thug?” (insert shots here).

To appropriate another line of poetry (from Pope, this time), must sound seem an “echo to the sense”? Must it make sense? Must it be echoing something else? Does it always suggest a body, some certain corporeal entity responsible for such noise? Must sound be a relationship, a communicating passageway between one hearing and one sounding, traceable to an originating source which gives it meaning, as footsteps getting louder might mean “danger” if tracked down to the body of an approaching adversary or “the promise of pleasure” if traced to the form of a lover?

In other word, is sound an echo of the reverberating body producing it? The question, to be sure, is older than the wireless; it is as ancient as the atmosphere and the dark of night begetting such thoughts. Consider this exchange from Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818), which investigates the relationship between (re)sonance and reception, between sounding and sounding out:

“Nonsense, sir,” interrupted Mr. Glowry. “That is not at all like the sound I heard.” 

“But, sir,” said Scythrop, “a key-hole may be so constructed as to act like an acoustic tube, and an acoustic tube, sir, will modify sound in a very remarkable manner. Consider the construction of the ear, and the nature and causes of sound. The external part of the ear is a cartilaginous funnel.” 

“It wo’n’t do, Scythrop. There is a girl concealed in this tower, and find her I will.”

Should I lead the ear to that concealed someone? Or will my play be all architecture, tower and bells, without a body in sight? We shall hear . . .

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More Milestone Reflections; or, Quo Vadis, broadcastellan?

Well, I have been away taking pictures. Taking pictures away, to be precise. It was an entirely manual engagement with the arts, involving nothing more than hauling some large canvasses—paintings by the late British artist David Tinker—for an upcoming exhibition. The things we do for a meal and a daytrip to a place where sheep are outnumbered by people (in this case, Cardiff). It so happens that the artist’s widow is Tracy Spottiswoode, who writes for television and radio. She is currently working on a radio play for the BBC, based on a story related to her by her father. It is an incident in the life of Hollywood actor Robert Vaughn, who found himself caught up in the turmoil of the Prague Spring while filming on location in Czechoslovakia, anno 1968. Considering that another successful radio writer, silent film music composer Neil Brand (last seen on UK television in Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns series, which concludes today with a portrait of Harold Lloyd) is coming to visit this weekend, I decided to give writing for the medium another try and return to my own audiodramatic tinkerings (first and last hinted at here).

I have written much about radio, but never for it. And since this 200th entry into my journal marks another milestone (the last one having been contemplated here) it is a convenient moment to reflect on my writings, their uses and purposes. “Quo Vadis” is meant here as a way of mapping out a way, of asking myself what to do next with and within this forum, another opportunity of looking back, listening ahead, and saying thanks to all those who have been reading and commenting over the past five months. Writing in such a marginalized field—and writing in such a marginalizing style about it—can be a rather lonely pursuit.

Perhaps I am craving a larger audience than I am enjoying here; but writing an audio play (for the first time since high school) is merely another creative response to my ongoing engagement with radio. And, if the lacking response to Larry Gelbart’s recent radio satire “Abrogate” (as discussed here) is any indication, there may not be a large audience—or a large vocal one—for such writing either.

That said, there will be less of me, here, in the next few weeks, weeks that will involve gathering new impressions elsewhere, in London and New York City. As you may recall, when last I was in New York, I very nearly went out of my mind going in search of a wireless network to post my writings—not the kind of part in the theater of the mind I had in mine.

The recent acquisitions you will find on my bookshelf (including Arch Oboler’s Fourteen Radio Plays, Abbot’s Handbook of Broadcasting, and Wylie’s 1938/39 and 1939/40 Best Broadcasts, all pictured above) provide models and instructions for the wireless tyro. Today’s writers can learn a lot from the old practitioners, restraint as they were by commercial ties. Radio plays can be talky and tiresome, so intellectual as to become insipid. A healthy dose of melodrama and a helping of sound effects sure liven things up. At least, I hope they will in my efforts at soundstaging. I might exhibit some of my experiments in radio writing on my podcast site.

So, if you enjoy plays for the ear—or derive pleasure hearing about someone struggling to give prospective listeners an earful—you might find my forthcoming discussions about aural storytelling and sound effects of some interest. Please stay tuned . . .

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Carrion Antigone: The Island Beyond Guantanamo Bay

Chicken pox. That’s what had kept the Johannesburg Market Theatre players from coming down to Cardigan Bay to perform in Athol Fugard’s The Island. Last night, the two (Mpho Osei-Tutu as Winston and Thami Mngqolo as John) made up for it, even though their audience (students at the local university) had taken off by then for some holiday destination. It was worthwhile hanging on to the ticket, though. And since I enjoy debating myself, I dug up an old college paper I had written on The Island for a graduate course in drama back in the mid-1990s. Aside from its title “Carrion Antigone,” that essay, while not outright dismissed by its academic audience, is rather too slight a performance to warrant reproduction here. It told me more about myself than the play, which I argued to be less concerned with historical facts than with cultural universals.

That statement is in serious need of revision. In its stead, I will only raise the questions that came to mind when I watched the play last night. While staging Sophocles’s Antigone—or re-staging the famous staging of it—on Robben Island, the notorious prison where Nelson Mandela once took on the role of Creon, Fugard does not so much follow than confront the Aristotelean maxim that poetry is a “more philosophical and higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.”

Winston and John, like Mandela, are the prisoners of an oppressive state. They are doing time as a direct consequence of the times in which they live. Indeed, Winston is doing more than time—he is in it for life. Yet even though he, like the defiant Antigone, has been robbed of a chance to count his days—to plan for and look forward to a tomorrow of his own shaping), he resents being asked to play the title role in Sophocles’s drama, which John wants to perform for fellow inmates and prison staff.

Aside from being uncomfortable playing a female character inside the homosocial confines of a prison, Winston dismisses the very idea of staging Sophocles as “child’s play.” Make-believe like Antigone seems remote and irrelevant to him: “I live my life. I’m here, and it’s history, not legends.” John tries to remind him that “child’s play” is what their warden calls their “convictions” and “ideals”—the beliefs for which they, like Antigone, were condemned.

Ideals are not removed from history—they are born of and beget it. To think of “history” and “ideals,” of “reality” and “play” as opposites may mean surrendering life to the system of binaries according to which Winston and John were cast as criminals.

When Winston learns that John’s sentence has been shortened and that his cellmate is to be released in a few months, his attitude toward performing changes. He is, after all, living quite outside what he thought of as history, on Robben Island, where even time in its relativity has lost its meaning: “My life? How do I count it, John? One . . . one . . . another day comes . . . one.”

Now “lost between life and death,” he has to meet the challenge of making his days matter. Playing Antigone—and playing it for those like him, right before the guards—may be just the thing. The latter may shrug off the trial and death sentence of Antigone as harmless “legend”; but to the former it will be the living history of their convictions.

The Island confronted me with my own remoteness from what I often thought of as the world before I entered the blogosphere—a world of ideas presented on the stage that is a journal such as this. Is this stage as much a new world as it is an old prison? Is that sphere a Robben Island on which inmates circulate, exchange, and recycle thought, as the guards watch on and let it pass, for now? How do you meet the challenge of making life matter when it does not seem to count or add up to much?

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Leaving His Ears Behind, E. M. Forster Steps Inside a Distant Echo Chamber of the Marabar Caves

Well, I wonder whether they will get here tonight. The troupe of the Johannesburg Market Theatre, I mean. Two weeks ago, they were supposed to take me to The Island; instead, they seemed to have gotten stranded somewhere else. I am all set to go, notwithstanding a lingering headache, brought on by alcohol and technology. As sobering as the experience might have been, I succeeded at last in putting my third podcast online. It conjures up the voices of a number of silent screen actresses; among them Mary Pickford, whose Little Annie Rooney was flickering on our screen this weekend, along with a 1924 production of Peter Pan, featuring the aforementioned Anna May Wong as Tiger Lily.

Both of these films are adaptations; but, whether you are familiar with the original or not, they are engrossingly cinematic so as to draw you in rather than draw your attention to their second-handedness. To me, an adaptation succeeds if it manages to make me forget its lineage, at least upon first inspection. I prefer to take in first and take on thereafter, to give a re-production a chance to stand on its own without forcing it to stand up against a text from which it more or less freely borrows.

Now, so-called old-time radio drama depended even more heavily on borrowed material than the movies. With schedules to be filled for weeks on end, there was great demand for stories, but a relatively short supply. Storytellers were, by and large, not paid enough to be original; given the governing principle of commercial sponsorship and the broadcasters’ insistence on groping for the largest audience possible, radio writers were discouraged from attempting anything new. In fact, they were even conservative in their approach to adaptation.

On this day, 12 June, in 1949, the NBC University Theater presented its version of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Intent on proving its literary fidelity, a little passage was cut right through this play. And out walked none other than E. M. Forster himself. The dramatization, as one critic remarked, bore so little resemblance to the novel as to have “missed the boat completely”; as such, it was as much in need of an endorsement as it was unworthy of it. Yet, the listener might feel tempted to conclude, if Forster did not mind lending his ear and commenting on the play, it surely could not be quite as “cumulatively degrading to all concerned—author, producer, and audience” as the captious critic made it out to be.

In fact, however, Forster did not comment on the adaptation at all; he did not even mention it. Instead, he gave a brief lecture on his novel and its significance—a lecture that was taped and inserted into a performance he had not himself auditioned. Remarking on the partition and independence of India and Pakistan, Forster expressed himself “thankful” that his novel was “out of date.” Listeners to the University Theater might not have noticed at all, considering that there was so little left of the debate with which Forster’s novel is concerned.

Entirely squandered in this uninspired adaptation are the aural potentialities of the Marabar Caves. Unlike film, radio drama is not obliged to impose concrete images on a writer’s vision. Like the novel, it allows its audience to co-create those images or to resist them in order to realize the metaphorical potentialities of language.

The caves are such a metaphor; they are an echo chamber for a clash of cultures, the site of cultural blindness where the false shelter of ignorance caves in on itself. Without resorting to much sound effects trickery, the radio adaptation could have suggested the horrors of Marabar—the reverberation of one’s own voice drowning out all others in a choric recital of an ode to blindness.

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Old-time Radio Primer: F Stands for Free

The dictionaries only manage to define it by telling us what it is not. It is such a troublesome little word, yet so attractive. “Free,” I mean. It has a lot to do with commercial broadcasting—the wireless with strings attached—which is why I am taking the liberty to include it in my old-time radio primer.  The state of being “free” is generally thought of as the absence of some restricting force or entity. However positive, it is a want we are wont to capture by negation. You are free to skip this line, by the way, unless, of course, you are somehow compelled to read on. Am I encroaching on your liberties by subjecting you to yet another sentence, by sentencing you to yet another subject? Go on, it is complimentary. And considering that wars are being fought over it, it is hardly a matter of no matter.

“Free” is so overused, misused and corrupted a lexical commodity that you have every reason to grow suspicious of anything offered on such terms—particularly that tautological fallacy of the “free gift” (with every purchase, no less). Eventually, you begin to wonder whether a word that only exists as an opposite, and exists only to be turned into that opposite, has any meaning at all.

If being free is the sensation of doing or being without, then freedom might very well be poverty, deprivation, and thraldom. Even if it is understood to mean doing or being without something on your own accord, you might want to take a moment of your spare time to consider how did you arrive at that accord, that agreement, without being under some forceful influence, and thus not free?

Here is the obligatory verse. It, too, is free this time:

“Free” is what looks good . . .
because you like the sound of it.
“Free” is what tastes good . . .
even if it smells funny.
“Free” is what feels good . . .
although it makes no sense at all.

In America, radio was being touted as a purveyor of gratis entertainment. And gratis deserves gratitude. You didn’t have to drop a nickel into the machine for every song or program you wanted to hear, even though the machine itself was no mean crystal set, but one of those expensive new console models that looked so nice in the advertisement and, the salesperson said, would fit so well into your living room. After all, you wouldn’t want to look cheap when handing out treats to your important dinner guests (the business kind, who could do something for you).

How comforting the thought that the entertainment at least was being paid for by someone who was also charitable enough to take care of all those who toiled and performed for your amusement over at the broadcasting studio, those big and expensive-looking facilities like the ones over at Radio City, which you’d love to visit some day, if only you had enough time or money for a trip to New York.

No need to get sarcastic. You are under no obligation to tune in tomorrow, as the announcer keeps insisting, although you sure would like to know whether Superman, “bombarded by livid bolts of atomic energy, and buried now for almost an hour,” will manage to save Metropolis or whether that “girl from a mining town in the West” can really “find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman”—especially now that she was being threatened by Lord Henry’s evil twin. Yes, you could turn it off. The freedom of it!

Sure, they’ve all got something to sell. That’s nothing, if hours of carefree listening can be had for just that—nothing. That’s why Jack Benny could make you laugh on the Lucky Strike Program last night and Nelson Eddy sang for you and the Chase and Sanborn people (the thought of which reminds you to get coffee at the market tomorrow—and to make it Sanka, just to show them)! It’s a free market.

So what if those who offered this free service really took it from you in the first place and used it for their own purposes! So what if they expected a little something—or rather a lot—in return for taking over the airwaves you quite forgot were free. You could always write a letter and complain, if it got out of hand. That was your right, as a taxpayer.

Perhaps we ought to remove the word from our vocabulary. It seems so much easier than striving for something so elusive. Feel free to differ.