Tag: Eugene O’Neill

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

A photograph published in the April 1926 issue of Radio Broadcast
showing a young John Huston (left) and fellow members of the Provincetown Players

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.

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They [Got] What They Wanted: or, We Postpone This Wedding

Starting next week, I shall once again take in a few shows on and off Broadway. In the meantime, I do what millions of small-townspeople used to do during the 1930s, ‘40s, and early ‘50s—I listen to theater. Since the 1920, such makeshift-believe had been coming straight from the New York stage, whether as on-air promotion or educational features. Aside from installing an announcer in the wings to translate the goings-on and comings-in, it took the producers of broadcast theatricals some time to figure out what could work for an audience unable to follow the action with their own eyes. When that was accomplished, in came the censors to determine what could come to their ears. The censors were in the business of anticipating what could possibly offend a small minority of self-righteous and sententious tuners-in who would wield their mighty pen to complain, causing radio stations to dread having risked their license for the sake of the arts.

Few established playwrights attempted to re-write for radio. One who dared was Kenyon Nicholson, whose Barker, starring Walter Huston and Claudette Colbert delighted Broadway audiences back in 1927 (and radio audiences nearly a decade later). On this day, 19 May, in 1946, the Theatre Guild on the Air presented his version of Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted, with John Garfield as Joe, Leo Carillo as Tony, and June Havoc (pictured) as Amy.

Now, I have never seen a stage production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning They Knew; nor have I read it. Like most tuning in that evening, I would not have known about the tinkering that went on so that the story involving a doomed mail-order May-December romance could be delivered into American living rooms—were it not for Nicholson’s own account of what it entailed to get They Knew past the censors.

Nicholson got to share his experience adapting They Knew, one of his “favorite plays,” in a foreword to his script, which was published in an anthology of plays produced by the Theatre Guild on the Air. According to the inexperienced adapter, his “enthusiasm for the job lessened somewhat” as soon as he began to undertake the revision:

“Radio is understandably squeamish when it comes to matters of illicit love, cuckolded husbands, illegitimate babies, and such; and, as these taboo subjects are the very core of Mr. Howard’s plot, I realized what a ticklish job I had undertaken.”

After all, Messrs. Chase and Landry remind us, as the result of a single listener complaint about this adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon, which retained expressions like “hell” and “for god’s sake,” several NBC Blue affiliates were cited by the FCC and ordered to defend their decision to air such an offensive program. Nicholson was nonetheless determined “that there could be no compromise. Distortion of motivation as a concession to Mr. and Mrs. Grundy of the listening public would be a desecration of Mr. Howard’s fine play.”

It was with “fear and trembling” that Nicholson submitted his script. Recalling its reception, he expressed himself “surprised to find the only alteration suggested by the Censor was that Joe seduce Amy before her marriage to old Tony.”

The “only alteration”? Is not the “before” in the remark of the pregnant Amy—”I must have been crazy, that night before the wedding”—precisely the kind of “compromise” and “[d]istortion” the playwright determined not to accept? Nicholson dismisses this change altogether too nonchalantly as a “brave effort to whitewash the guilty pair!” Rather, it is the playwright’s whitewashing of his own guilt in this half-hearted confession about his none too “brave” deed.

The censors sure knew what they did not want those to hear who never knew what they did not get.

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To the Moon

It has been hailed as “magnificent” and “mesmerizing.” Kevin Spacey’s performance in the Old Vic production of Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten, I mean. After seeing the Old Vic’s take on The Philadelphia Story last year, in which Spacey, the theater’s artistic director, acted less-than-Cary Grantly opposite Jennifer Ehle, I was skeptical, to say the least. The Spacey age at the Old Vic has proven a troubled one.

I have yet to experience anything “mesmerizing” at the Old Vic, where, aside from Spacey’s turn in A Moon and Philadelphia Story, I also watched Sir Ian McKellen camping it up as Widow Twankey in Aladdin, which struck me, unaccustomed to the Christmas panto tradition, as disenchanting and tawdry. A Moon is well beyond both of those trifles, without quite rising above unevenness. I am not sure, though, whether to attribute my dissatisfaction with it to the script, the production, the performances, or to a perverse streak all my own—which accounts for the mess I made of these oft-revised notes.

To begin with Spacey, whose career I’ve been following since the early 1990s, when I was introduced to him by a mutual friend, backstage at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway, where the man who would be Lex Luthor appeared with whatever-happened-to-Academy-Award-winner Mercedes Ruehl in Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers. No doubt, I have been trying to discover the man in his parts ever since, which does not help matters. Spacey’s off-stage persona has irked me at times, an uneasy, calculated ease that threatens to render his acting as disingenuous as an act. Then again, selecting his roles for stage or screen, he seems most comfortable and convincing in the skin of the con, the trickster, or the sham.

In A Moon, Spacey is Jim Tyrone, a middle-aged, self-confessed “third-rate ham” who lays bare his conscience-tormenting past while under the influence, in a state where men are most likely to drop their masks. Spacey’s Jim is a queer duck, more likely to drop a glass than a hint of hidden truths: there are elements of camp in his gestures and postures, suggesting a self-indulgent act rather than honesty.

In his “reflections” on A Moon (published in the playbill), Spacey claims that the challenge of impersonating a drunk is to play him “so he doesn’t become monotonous.” Was it just that, or could playing the lush be an opportunity to go “gay all of a sudden” (to quote Grant’s character in Bringing Up Baby) and explain such release as temporary spasms?

A Moon is a play of lost schemes and the schemers who get lost in them, who struggle to redeem themselves by scrapping their act or getting it together. The central character is Josie Hogan, a farmer’s daughter whom O’Neill envisioned as “so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak,” a dated, gender-stereotyping description Eve Best could not be expected to fit. Just as Spacey’s Jim may not know as much about loving women as he claims, being that he is more likely to adore or assault than to embrace them, Josie only puts on the act of a wanton to conceal that she is virtuous, a quality she derides as being “worse than decent.”

Despite his flaws, Josie has fallen in love with Jim; or, rather, she loves him for his vulnerability when exposing them. She might have more satisfaction forgoing the company of men altogether, considering that she is being manipulated into becoming a mantrap for Jim in order keep a roof over the pighead of her father (Colm Meaney). While not lacking in willfulness, she is the only one of Hogan’s children to remain on the farm, having assisted in the escape of her younger brother, a “New England Irish Catholic Puritan, Grade B” (played by an altogether miscast Eugene O’Hare, who seemed to have gotten into the first act on a Guy Madison scholarship).

Disregarding O’Neill’s instructions, Bob Crowley, the designer in charge at the Old Vic, places what there is of action in a surrealist set reminiscent of the Dust Bowl conceived by Dali instead of a September day in the Connecticut of the early 1920s. As a symbol of farmer Hogan’s crookedness and his lost dream of a plot, this hovel of a crazy house created in me a sense of dislocation that even the earthy performance of Irish actor Meaney could not counter. And yet, it is a set fit for a play that seems set on estrangement, that sets you up by setting out as comedy but never quite settles there.

There are shades of Ah, Wilderness!, the lightest, least controversial of O’Neil’s works, considered inoffensive enough to be frequently adapted for American radio during his lifetime; but then this Moon, considered unfit for Broadway until long after the playwright’s death in 1953, turns on you and the light-heartedness gives way to some heavy-handed, drawn-out confessionals.

The audience, like the titular satellite, is being compelled to keep circling what amounts to a rehearsal for a funeral during which fears and failings are exposed and confessed, talked about rather than dealt with, let alone resolved. Redemption has rarely felt quite this unredeeming. If the lack of resolution may be considered a triumph of modernism, the orbiting in the sphere of words strikes me as a failure in dramaturgy.

The circular and roundabout are not without their returns; but, I’d rather be spinning quietly in a chairoplane (like the one at the fun fair on London’s Leicester Square, pictured above) than sit through what amounts to a cycle of remorse and unfulfilled desires.