Radio Drama

History

The first radio station in the United States, Pittsburgh’s KDKA, began broadcasting in 1920. The idea of competing networks scheduling program slates to win listeners from one another was almost a decade away. By 1922, only thirty stations operated in the United States, but radio was already becoming the new-appliance phenomenon that later television, the videocassette recorder, and the personal computer would become: By 1923, 556 stations broadcast an assortment of programs. The production of receiver sets shows the same explosion of growth: From only a few receivers being produced in 1921, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA, incorporated on October 17, 1919) and others such as Atwater Kent and Westinghouse Electric Corporation manufactured one hundred thousand sets in 1922 and five hundred thousand in 1923. For the first time in 1923, both Sears, Roebuck, and Company and Montgomery Ward offered radios in their catalogs.

Tom Lewis’s book on the genesis of radio further points out that the end of the 1920’s saw another surge in the popularity of the medium, sparked by the public’s desire to follow the heroics of Charles A. Lindbergh. When William S. Paley combined two small networks into the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and named himself president, he established conditions that would affect not only the development of American radio drama but also the basic nature of the medium.

Paley sought to compete with the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and its president David Sarnoff by widening the types of programs broadcast. NBC had until then been featuring programs that often played to the highest tastes of listeners. Paley eschewed classical concerts and educational fare and instead found a receptive audience that enjoyed jazz, vaudeville comics, and soap opera. It was NBC that eventually broadcast the most popular radio series ever, Amos ’n’ Andy (beginning in 1926 as Sam ’n’ Henry on Chicago’s WGN, the show first aired on NBC under its familiar title on August 19, 1929), and the national sensation of that comedy spurred further sales of radios.

Worthington Miner wrote about the early days of the medium and how the expenses of creating a national industry were absorbed by the broadcasters, the manufacturers, and the sponsors. The listeners, however, had to pay too:

[T]he price to the public was the stamp of a salesman’s mind on the dramatic content and intent of every program put on the air. . . . [A] vigorous theater thrives on controversy, and in precisely those areas of prejudice and conviction—sex, politics, and religion—that are taboo for the salesman.

Miner added that “the wonder is that anything of quality or substance ever reached the public air.”

His comments identify both the main propellant and the main obstacle for first-rate radio drama in the United States: commercialization. The revenues generated by the sale of airtime made possible innovative, intelligent plays such as those produced by Orson Welles, Norman Corwin, and Arch Oboler in the 1930’s and 1940’s; the need, however, for large audiences to satisfy the sponsors virtually guaranteed that most radio shows followed the safe rather than the experimental. Howard Fink tabulated the extreme imbalance toward the popular in American radio drama and concluded that during the twenty-year span from the rise of radio to the rise of television at most only twelve radio series (out of some six thousand listed by the Variety Radio Directory) attempted serious plays written expressly for the radio or adapted from other media. That comes to less than half of 1 percent.

The natural comparison to radio in Great Britain tells a different story. The work of John Reith as the first general manager of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) saved British radio and later television from the American type of commercialization by having the BBC set up as a public utility partly paid for by the small fees of listeners. The history of serious radio drama in England has never been a summary of isolated plays and programs of merit but rather the story of the development of an art form that continued even after the rise of television.

It may be unfair to blame Paley for the paradox of American radio—how commercialization alternatively abetted and retarded literary drama. The facts support different readings. Paley may have lowered the quality of the airwaves by broadcasting to a wider audience, or he may have begun to recognize that the growth of the industry was great enough to make room for smaller audiences of different tastes. Paley, along with Irving Reis, for example, became the driving force behind The Columbia Workshop (1936), one of the best dramatic anthologies in American radio.

A half-hour “sustaining series” (that is, free from commercial sponsorship), The Columbia Workshop debuted with a suspense drama written by Reis, Meridian 7-1212, a work that Fink described as going “behind the mechanical illusions of realistic sound to show a real understanding of the space of the medium, especially the necessity of creating verbal and intellectual complications to replace the visual complexities of the theatre.” The following year, The Columbia Workshop offered the first American verse play written for radio, Archibald MacLeish’s The Fall of the City: A Verse Play for Radio (pr. 1937). MacLeish had written a polemic against fascism, and Reis cast young Welles as the narrator who describes the subjugation of thousands of people to a conqueror who turns out to be a fearful-sounding but empty suit of armor. The narrator’s description of the lifting of the visor and the hollowness inside placed a vivid image in the minds of radio listeners.

The broadcast became the single most famous radio show until that time. Blending sound techniques and poetry to exploit the theater-of-the-mind capabilities of radio, Reis broadcast the show from an armory to approximate the acoustics of a town square. He recorded the sounds of two hundred extras and timed the playbacks during the performance so that, following the live cheers of the extras, the echoing crowd noise sounded overwhelming. Welles had to perform his lines in the quiet of an isolation booth, a change made out of necessity but one that created a type of verbal concerto through the balance of contrasting sounds of the crowd and the narrator.

Orson Welles

Just as Amos ’n’ Andy fueled the growth of popular radio, the MacLeish broadcast made serious radio drama exciting and more popular. Soon writers of note such as W. H. Auden and Stephen Vincent Benét were crafting scripts directly for the radio; later, other literary figures such as Sherwood Anderson, Maxwell Anderson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Saroyan, and Dorothy Parker would work in the medium. Welles’s next radio assignment continued the innovations. His seven-part version of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862; English translation, 1862) for the Mutual Network was called by Welles a “projection” rather than an adaptation or dramatization. To prepare what may have been the first broadcast miniseries, Welles chose important selections from the novel to be read by himself as narrator or by actors performing the characters. He used sound effects and music to accompany Hugo’s prose and also played the part of Jean Valjean. The result, according to Welles’s biographer Frank Brady, was that “Welles developed the character of Jean Valjean more fully than it had been in the novel.”

With his growing experiences in radio, Welles, unlike many radio actors, by now knew the difference between reading lines in front of a microphone and sounding on the air like a real person. In such a context in which sound is the only medium for communication, to refer to the actor’s voice as an instrument risks understatement. Brady wrote that Welles would position himself before a microphone as if it were a kind of sonic mirror, and “he would seemingly be able to gesture with sound and move himself in space, creating illusions of intimacy or distance by employing only certain voice changes.”

In 1938, CBS offered Welles total artistic control of a new sustaining series to begin on July 11. The network hoped that the program would receive enough favorable attention to bring in advertisers as continuing sponsors for the hour-long show. First Person Singular, the name that was eventually chosen, would also provide another vehicle for Welles’s Mercury players, a repertory company performing in theater works that Welles and John Houseman were directing and producing. The limited budget and the weekly demands of radio (and also perhaps the satisfactions of total artistic control) kept Welles from commissioning original scripts, so he settled on the popular classics to adapt himself with the help of Houseman, Howard Koch, Richard Brooks, Abraham Polonsky, and Herman J. Mankiewicz. Their first offering was Dracula (1897), restructured from the letters-and-diary approach in which Bram Stoker had written it into a style more suited to radio. His other shows in his first season included adaptations of Treasure Island (1883; on July 18), A Tale of Two Cities (1859; July 25), The Thirty-nine Steps (1915; August 5), three short stories (August 8), Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601; August 15), and Welles’s favorite novel, G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908; September 5). CBS renewed the series for the fall and renamed it Mercury Theatre on the Air.

The most famous Mercury performance came later in 1938 on Halloween Eve, when CBS broadcast an adaptation by Koch of H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds (1898). Welles decided to tell the story of the Martian invasion in the format of a special-report newcast. His inspiration may have partly been the popular show The March of Time (1931), which dramatized actual news events in a radio studio with sound effects and a live orchestra. Such a format smudged the line between the real and the fictional and testified to the power of drama on radio. In an age before the ubiquitous camcorder gave television newscasts their immediacy, radio simply manufactured its reality, re-creating baseball games and news events as needed. The March of Time was the most popular news program on the air. In interviews years later, Welles said he also intended in the broadcast to lampoon the seriousness of radio and the way listeners passively accepted everything they heard over the airwaves.

For the man-from-Mars broadcast, Welles wanted to develop the novel’s science-fiction premise realistically. The actor playing a field reporter, for example, listened to the recordings of on-the-air accounts of the burning of the dirigible Hindenburg and tried to mimic the eyewitness panic. According to Houseman, the opening of the show was intentionally boring in its protracted use of simulated dance music from a Brooklyn hotel to contrast the later urgency of the supposed news bulletins. The show would switch its listeners from the network newsroom to remote feeds from the invasion sites. Welles played Professor Pierson, an astronomer at an observatory. Although the beginning of the broadcast explained that the program was a dramatization of The War of the Worlds and repeated that disclaimer later, the show nevertheless created widespread panic when many listeners thought that the world was actually being invaded. Welles and the Mercury players were front-page news the next morning. Ironically, for all Welles’s ambitious literary efforts in the medium, this was the broadcast that eventually won the program a sponsor. On December 9, 1938, the Mercury Theatre on the Air became the Campbell Playhouse.

Although nothing matched the invasion broadcast for sensationalism, some of Welles’s other shows perhaps illustrate better his mastery of radio as a storytelling medium. On the whole, he tended to think of the scripts for broadcast as stories rather than as plays. As Richard Wilson, of the Mercury actors, describes it: “Radio is the medium for the story. The best storyteller was Orson. . . . He likened radio listeners to the audience that gathered around a storyteller in the town square, held spellbound with imaginative and fanciful tales.” The show for October 29, 1939, was a radio version of Booth Tarkington’s novel The Magnificent Ambersons (1918).

In 1942, Welles would also choose Tarkington’s novel as the subject for his second film, but he knew that he could not play the part of George Amberson Minafer on screen, since the tall Welles was too heavy and mature looking to portray convincingly a spoiled adolescent. On radio, however, Welles played George and succeeded at bringing out both the proud and the whiny sides of pampered youth. The overlapping dialogue and sound montage that Welles’s early films Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) employ so effectively have their roots in the techniques of radio drama. (Certainly Welles’s radio talents invigorated his own films and even motion pictures in general; the use of sound montage in radio, however, is sometimes mistakenly credited to Welles when the work of True Boardman on the CBS anthology Sunday Afternoon Theatre, 1937—also known as Silver Theatre—probably deserves that distinction.)

Welles adapted Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) twice for radio. The second Conrad broadcast, from March 13, 1945, appeared on the series This Is My Best (1944), for which Welles had become director as well as host. Welles, playing the narrator Marlow, used the grunts of the natives lugging ivory to suggest the ominous climate of Africa. After journeying up the river to find Kurtz, his predecessor, Marlow hears Kurtz’s last anguished whisper “the horror, the horror” and senses the degree to which Kurtz has viewed, and become involved in, the dark side of human behavior. When Marlow, however, returns to meet with Kurtz’s fiancée and is asked to relate the dying man’s last words, he lies and says that Kurtz spoke his fiancée’s name. The audience hears the ghostly echo of Kurtz, however, repeating “the horror, the horror” and understands in that single aural image that the evils experienced by Kurtz have found their way into the subconscious of Marlow.

Shows such as The Mercury Theatre on the Air owed part of their mystique to the live nature of the broadcasts. In the days before magnetic tape, scratchy acetate discs were the only way engineers could reproduce sound, and so programs were aired live. Colorful stories exist about Welles, who was widely employed as an actor in live radio, using a blaring ambulance as his crosstown transportation between one show and another. Sometimes still in his theater makeup, he would race from the ambulance into a private elevator to be whisked up to a broadcast studio and handed a script minutes before airtime. Photographs show him as director of his own program, standing on a raised platform before a podium and a microphone with an engineering booth in front of him, actors and the sound-effects staff to his left, and Bernard Herrmann and his orchestra behind him. Everyone wore headphones, and Welles worked the creative ensemble like a conductor of sorts, reading lines and cuing others in order to obtain the right sound mix. John Houseman deserves credit for disciplining Welles’s productive but often uncontrolled genius. In a rare surviving disc of a rehearsal session, Welles can be heard intoning perfectly the lines from a Shakespearean soliloquy and then bursting into a profane string of epithets because at the end of the speech he elided the t in “restless.” Such a slip might not be noticed onstage or on film, where both the eye and the ear are occupied, but radio augmented the aural dimension to a degree that the speech had to be consonant perfect. Such dramatic heights were never far from the mercantile because Welles frequently read the commercials, too. One critic of the time lamented: “It’s a shock to hear a plug for prune juice by someone who sounds like the Archbishop of Canterbury.”

Just as fascinating as the way live shows were prepared are the accounts of resourcefulness of those in charge of sound effects. Before the invention of tape libraries of effects, sound engineers had to re-create live on the air the sounds needed for a particular show. For their broadcast of A Tale of Two Cities, Welles and Houseman, for example, experimented for hours in order to find the right vegetable to hack for the severing crunch of the guillotine (they finally selected a cabbage). The jobs of sound-effect engineers required them to cultivate a lore all their own. Trial and error taught them that a knife plunged into a potato or grapefruit close to the microphone made the sound of a stabbed torso. Shaking wheat stalks produced a whistle like wind blowing through brush. Squeezing a box of corn starch made scrunches like footsteps in snow. Hitting a sponge simulated the thud of a punch to the stomach.

Along with Welles, Norman Corwin and Arch Oboler also stand out for their important work in creating serious radio drama. Corwin’s first series was Words Without Music (1938), which combined Corwin’s own scripts with adaptations of classics such as the poetry of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg. In setting free verse for the radio, Corwin let each poem suggest the best approach, but he is particularly remembered for using choral speech effectively. Corwin’s next series, Pursuit of Happiness (1939), introduced what Corwin called a “radio opera,” a blend of music, documentary, and drama. If Welles’s gifts to radio were primarily those of the consummate actor-director, Corwin’s legacies were those of the writer. His sensitivity to language aided in his broadcasts of poetry and in imparting a lyrical dimension to his own scripts. Like Welles, Corwin was associated with The Columbia Workshop. His radio script coauthored with Lucille Fletcher, My Client Curley (1940), about a luckless theatrical agent who happens on a boy with a dancing caterpillar, became one of the classics of radio and was later made into a film. Another series, Columbia Presents Corwin (1944), continued his originality and is regarded as perhaps his best work. Some of Corwin’s memorable plots for this series include a story about a boy’s visit to heaven in search of his lost dog and a dramatization of the return of Abraham Lincoln’s body by train to Springfield, Illinois.

Oboler first gained attention in popular radio by working with performers such as Rudy Vallee, Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, and Edgar Bergen. The incongruity of a ventriloquist performing on radio did not deter millions from enjoying Bergen (nor for that matter a radio dance show featuring Fred Astaire), and Oboler learned the techniques of radio drama in this apprenticeship. Oboler’s first work as a writer-director came on the NBC suspense program Lights Out (1936), which made his name well known. His sustaining series Arch Oboler’s Plays (1939) offered anthology programming and competed with both Welles and The Columbia Workshop. Oboler relied often on the psychological element of radio and explored the consciousness of the central character to carry forward the story. For example, Oboler’s episode from Lights Out called “Oxychloride X” focuses on a college student hazed by fraternity men. The highlight of the show occurs when the student decides to get even and travels across campus at night to break into the science laboratory and concoct an all-powerful solvent. His wild mutterings organize the scene, reveal his insecurities, and establish an eerie tone. Like Corwin, Oboler worked during the war on propaganda plays for radio, which, more centered on messages, were less innovative in technique.

Atmospheric Techniques

The mainstream of American radio, though utilizing the dramatic form, featured almost exclusively popular rather than serious programs. Freed from seriousness of purpose and depth of thought, these shows nevertheless reveal at times aspects of technique that showcase the medium well. The sound effects and voice characterizations of Mel Blanc, for example, greatly enhanced the comedy of Jack Benny. When Benny started up his Maxwell, Blanc’s exaggerated sputters all but gave the car a personality; when Benny opened his vault, Blanc’s creaks and groans made the comedian’s stinginess something that could be heard. Benny moved his show to television in the 1950’s, and audiences actually saw a set designer’s version of the famous vault. This reality, however, probably did not measure up to the medieval picture in the minds of listeners. Fibber McGee’s closet of junk, the clip-clop of horse-drawn hansom cabs in Sherlock Holmes’s Victorian London, and the Wild West of the Lone Ranger illustrate the power of radio serial drama to unlock the imagination.

One of the longest-running detective programs, The Shadow (1931), also used the medium well. The Shadow of the pulp magazines published during the run of the radio show was a sinister figure in black who used blazing revolvers to fight crime. The character on radio, however, was never seen. Having the power “to cloud men’s minds,” the hero seemed to appear and penetrate the psychological defenses of the criminals with his uncanny powers. In the episode titled “The White Legion,” The Shadow (performed by Welles) intimidates a secret society by exposing its members’ identities. The final scene takes place in open court, where suddenly the mysterious voice of The Shadow disrupts the proceedings and names the judge himself as the ringleader of the criminals. The series’ atmosphere catered to the imaginative powers of its audience.

John Dickinson Carr and Val Gielgud

Another gifted writer from the flowering of radio is John Dickson Carr. Carr is mainly remembered as a detective novelist whose books employ locked-room puzzles. Because he was also a master of atmosphere and mood, his talent thrived in radio. Carr wrote mystery plays on both sides of the Atlantic, and his experiences point out some of the differences between American and British radio drama. Carr submitted his first radio play, a three-part work featuring his Chestertonian hero Dr. Gideon Fell, to Val Gielgud, the head of drama programming for the BBC. In England, Carr learned, writing took precedence over time limits and genre. Gielgud did not feel obligated to adhere to the formula conventions of mysteries or even to preset lengths of programs. In addition, he wanted the writer present at rehearsals to explain his intentions and, if necessary, to make any revisions. Contrary to the American custom, Gielgud fostered a radio drama that minimized musical bridges, clichéd “knife-chords,” and sound effects. In “The Black Minute,” Carr’s second script for the BBC, for example, a transition is accomplished by simply fading from a frightened woman’s cries to the relaxed voice of the taxi driver who had brought her moments ago to a sinister house. The contrast between the sound of her anguish and the cabdriver’s calm makes the heroine’s plight more fretful for the audience. Carr’s script also shows how sound effects, used sparingly, can assume greater force. The key scene in “The Black Minute” is a séance in which the characters join hands in a locked, darkened room. As the tense characters await the words of the medium, the only sound is the background scratch of a gramophone. As with the earlier transition, less becomes more. The methodical grinding of the gramophone makes the lengthening silence more unbearable.

With the United States’ entry into World War II, Carr returned to the United States and wrote plays for the CBS series Suspense (1942). There, he encountered a work situation nearly the opposite of that in England. The American show was timed to the last second, and Carr’s scripts were tailored to fit the predesigned pattern. With its own orchestra, Suspense also made generous use of background music and strident knife-chords as sonic punctuation. Carr wrote “The Dead Sleep Lightly” for Suspense in the thirty-minute format of most American shows, but when he returned to England in 1943, he expanded the script of forty minutes, added his detective Dr. Fell as a foil, and boldly changed the ending to let the culprit, exposed by Fell, avoid arrest.

It is a mistake to imply that the worlds of American and British radio drama were irreconcilable. Though clear differences existed, Gielgud could also see the comparative merits of the other style. Carr served as a go-between when he offered Gielgud more of his scripts from Suspense to develop into a series on the BBC (Appointment with Fear, debuting on September 11, 1943, was the result). Gielgud’s reaction to “all the trimmings of atmospheric bass-voiced narrator, knife-chords and other specially composed musical effects, and a regular length of half an hour timed to the split second” was that “the temptation to compete ‘on the home ground’ [was] irresistible.” Carr’s program proved to be a success.

The BBC

The development of British radio plays can be traced to the broadcast of Twelfth Night on May 28, 1923. The first original work for British radio was Richard Hughes’s Danger (1924), a fifteen-minute play about three characters trapped in the pitch black of a coal mine. Reginald Denny’s The White Chanteau (1925) became the first original, full-length play on the BBC. In the 1930’s, as technology improved, more attention to original programming brought forth the experimental play by Tyrone Guthrie The Flowers Are Not for You to Pick (1930). Guthrie’s play takes place in the mind of the protagonist—a young missionary who drowns on his way to his first assignment in China—and breaks up the traditional linear plot by moving the audience via flashbacks through a number of formative moments in the hero’s life. Guthrie understood that time could be manipulated more effectively by the radio dramatist than space, something that holds true even though stereo broadcasts in later years have made space a more important dimension. The emphasis on the psychological can also be seen in Louis MacNeice’s verse play Christopher Columbus (1944), in which different actors voice different parts (“Doubt,” “Faith”) of the hero’s mind. MacNeice’s fantasy The Dark Tower (1947) emphasizes sound effects and music more than his previous plays and is sometimes mentioned as MacNeice’s best work. Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices (pr. 1953) is Dylan Thomas ’s highly regarded radio play about small-town life in Wales. The broadcast elements of language, sound, and silence may in part explain the interest of Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett in radio. Explorations of the ambiguities of communication and the richness of silence lend themselves ideally to the medium. Pinter’s radio plays A Slight Ache (pr. 1959) and A Night Out (pr. 1960) preceded his first stage success, and Beckett’s radio plays All That Fall (pr. 1957), Embers (pr. 1959), and Words and Music (pr. 1962) have taken a place in importance next to his stage works. The tradition continued. Robert Bolt’s play about Sir Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons (pr. 1960), appeared first on BBC radio in 1954. John Arden, Tom Stoppard, and John Mortimer also made contributions to British radio drama.

Sound Drama on Long-playing Records

If the term “radio drama” may be slightly altered to “sound drama,” then the development of the genre can be charted through the rise of the long-playing record and audio cassettes. One of the first stage works preserved on sound recordings was Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman. Miller had written radio plays after graduating from the University of Michigan, and his expressionistic play about Willy Loman centers on Willy’s mind and its slipping hold on reality, material well suited for sound drama. Columbia recorded the play with Thomas Mitchell as Willy; later, Caedmon Records issued a version with Lee J. Cobb as the salesperson. Eventually, technology permitted a nostalgic renaissance for radio drama when many old-time radio shows (such as Basil Rathbone’s and Nigel Bruce’s work as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, respectively) were issued as record albums and audio cassettes.

Both Caedmon Records and London Records have produced unabridged disc and cassette recordings of the complete plays of William Shakespeare. This should come as no surprise. Before CBS radio had begun The Columbia Workshop, it had experimented in the summer of 1937 with a series of adaptations and selected scenes from Shakespeare. Welles worked on the Hamlet broadcast. While CBS prepared its series, NBC quickly signed John Barrymore for its own Shakespeare series to start in late June. Though the casting on CBS emphasized film stars rather than stage performers (Rosalind Russell as Beatrice, Edward G. Robinson as Petruchio, Humphrey Bogart as Hotspur), Shakespeare proved ideal for radio. With stage directions and action incorporated into much of the poetry, Shakespeare’s dramaturgy minimized props and relied on the aural. The rhymed couplets signaled the close of a scene for radio listeners just as they did for their original spectators in Elizabethan England. In 1964, the Broadway cast of Hamlet, directed by John Gielgud and starring Richard Burton, recorded the play on a four-disc set for Columbia Records. BBC radio has often released some of its best Shakespeare productions on audio cassettes as well.

Caedmon Records, as it was producing its complete Shakespeare on long-playing records during the 1960’s and early 1970’s, also assembled an impressive series of performances of classic plays on disc. Most of these productions, as well as the majority of its Shakespeare recordings, were directed by Howard Sackler, author of the play The Great White Hope (pr. 1967), and an accomplished interpreter of stage works for sound media. These unabridged recordings helped to keep alive the tradition of sound drama after the popularity of radio waned. The Caedmon multidisc sets also found their way into the catalogs of countless public and academic libraries where they became a valuable educational resource for the flood of “baby boomers” entering high school and college. The advisory board for this project included, among others, distinguished figures in education (John Gassner, a Yale professor and an anthologist of numerous drama collections), in drama (Tyrone Guthrie and Eva Le Gallienne), and in the recording industry (Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Mantell, pioneering producers in spoken-word audio). The ongoing series was also marketed as a prestige subscription service called the Theatre Recording Society.

This Caedmon catalog of recorded drama contains some impressive performances that have gained historical stature. The National Theatre of Great Britain’s 1964 production of Henrik Ibsen’s Bygmester Solness (pr. 1893; The Master Builder, 1893) with Michael Redgrave, Maggie Smith, and Derek Jacobi, for example, was offered to Theatre Society subscribers in 1965. Laurence Olivier’s production of Chekhov’s Dyadya Vanya (pr. 1899; Uncle Vanya, 1914), first staged at the Chichester Festival Theatre and later performed for British pay television, also became a part of the series, as did the 1972 Lincoln Center production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (pr. 1953) with Robert Foxworth and Pamela Payton-Wright.

The drama recordings that originated in the Caedmon studios were also memorable, featuring, for example, a classic and sensitive production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (pr. 1944) directed by Howard Sackler with Montgomery Clift, Jessica Tandy, Julie Harris, and David Wayne, as well as recordings of The Front Page (pr. 1928) with Robert Ryan and Bert Convy, the durable stage comedy by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, and Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (pr. 1920) with James Earl Jones. This last recording included a fifty-minute rehearsal discussion of the play among director Theodore Mann and the actors. With the rise of the audio-book industry in the 1980’s and 1990’s, selections from the Caedmon archive, most of which had fallen out of print, found new audiences when the plays were reissued on audio cassettes and compact discs by Harper Audio, the subsequent copyright holders of the Caedmon collection.

The LA Theatre Works and New Media

In the late twentieth century the efforts of designing new productions of classic and contemporary plays for audio had been largely taken over by a group called the LA Theatre Works (LATW). Having originated in 1987 and broadcasting over several radio services (such as the group’s associate producer, station KCRW-FM in Santa Monica, California, as well as National Public Radio, or NPR, and the BBC), this award-winning organization eventually assembled an audio theater collection of more than three hundred titles, reportedly the largest in the country. Their growing list of performers (Alan Alda, Annette Bening, Richard Dreyfuss, Julie Harris, Amy Irving, Nathan Lane, and Jason Robards, among others) formed an American roster as noteworthy as the predominantly British casts who had appeared on the Caedmon recordings. Typically the LATW presents its unabridged plays in radio-theater format before subscription patrons, and the live responses of these audiences enhance the listening experience. Most important, however, the recordings of the LATW illustrate further refinements in the art of recorded drama.

The LATW recording of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly (pr. 1988), for example, uses a richly textured sound design more elaborate than the left- and right-channel separation of early stereo recordings. To present the recollected flashbacks of John Lithgow’s character, who addresses the audience from a prison cell, the recording alters the timbre and sonic depth of these remembered scenes as they are dramatized. Sometimes Lithgow’s character narrates the beginning of a flashback (speaking close to the microphone for an immediacy that suggests the present day) and then appears as a younger man in the flashback scene (speaking at a greater distance but also with greater separation of channels and a slight filter on the sound). The ever-shifting time structure of Hwang’s play is thus clearly and effectively translated to the sound medium.

Two unabridged, dramatic readings of novels by the LATW (of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, 1922, and Frank Norris’s McTeague, 1899) signaled further innovation by blending the characteristics of drama and fiction. Director Gordon Hunt assigned the third-person narration of Lewis’s novel to a large number of voices rather than to only one narrator. In these passages a new voice takes over the narration with each alteration in thought, emotion, or psychology. This technique eventually becomes the sound equivalent of a cut or edit in a film so that important shifts in the tone or content of the storytelling are heightened. The listener’s attention is also more easily engaged over the course of a fourteen-hour recording with such smooth gear-shifting of the audio narration. The strategy works in a near-intuitive way, suggesting that the subtleties in Lewis’s novel were there for the careful reader to discern and that the changing narrators are simply italicizing a richness inherent in the text. The catalog of the LATW includes works by numerous classic (Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Ibsen) and contemporary (Neil Simon, Wendy Wasserstein, Sir Alan Ayckbourn, Athol Fugard) playwrights. In late 2001 and early 2002, the LATW took radio drama into a new arena by becoming one of the program providers for the XM digital satellite radio network.

As technology changes, so too does the delivery of recorded drama. The Internet as well has become a storehouse for many productions of drama on audio with the ever-improving capabilities of streaming media. The experience of radio drama can be a liberating one for performers and audiences. Actor Richard Dreyfuss’s comment about the recordings of the LATW really applies to all creatively effective radio drama: “Film and theater are limited only by the eye. Audio theater is limited only by the imagination.”

Bibliography

Callow, Simon. Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu. New York: Viking Penguin, 1996. Callow writes insightfully about Welles and his work in radio and includes a list of Welles’s radio broadcasts.

Carr, John Dickson. The Door to Doom and Other Detections. Edited by Douglas G. Greene. New York: Harper and Row, 1980. Six radio plays by Carr, a bibliography of Carr’s radio scripts, and a listing of other radio scripts based on Carr’s novels.

Crook, Tim. Radio Drama. New York: Routledge, 1999. Traces the evolution of radio drama, from early broadcasts in 1914 to modern-day “media guerrilla” productions. Examines the techniques necessary for effective radio presentations.

Drakakis, John. British Radio Drama. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Offers a historical and critical examination of the development of British radio, focusing on the contributions of MacNiece, Beckett, Dylan Thomas, Dorothy L. Sayers, and many more.

Greene, Douglas G. “John Dickson Carr and the Radio Mystery.” In The Dead Sleep Lightly. New York: Doubleday, 1983. Greene’s expert essay surveys Carr’s work in radio and introduces nine radio plays by Carr.

Greene, Douglas G. John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles. New York: Otto Penzler, 1996. Provides a biography of Carr and includes a checklist of Carr’s radio work with some annotations.

Lewis, Tom. Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. The story of the rise of radio focuses on the lives of Lee de Forest, Edward Howard Armstrong, and David Sarnoff.

Nevins, Francis M., Jr., and Ray Stanich. The Sound of Detection: Ellery Queen’s Adventures in Radio. Madison, Ind.: Brownstone Books, 1983. The history of a single continuing radio series by authoritative writers on radio and mystery fiction.

Theatre of the Imagination: Radio Stories by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre. Six audio cassettes. Produced by Frank Beacham and Richard Wilson. Santa Monica, Calif.: Voyager, 1988. Audio recordings of Orson Welles’s work in radio, the package also includes an audio documentary featuring members of the Mercury Theatre discussing the quality and style of their broadcasts.

Welles, Orson, and Peter Bogdanovich. This Is Orson Welles. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Transcripts with annotations of Bogdanovich’s many conversations with Welles about his career. This is perhaps the best source for Welles’s own thoughts on his work in radio.