Great Plays

Last week, for the first time in more than twelve radio seasons, neither NBC (the old Red network) nor the Blue Network broadcast an hour-long adaptation of a stage play. None was scheduled for the future. Possibly not many millions of listeners noticed this, but it meant that the book was closed on an era of radio.

Early enthusiasts and amateurs of broadcasting took the theater as their heritage, as a matter of course. At first, being poor, they stuck to classics on which no royalties had to be paid. In 1928 pioneering NBC broadcast The Tempest--the first Shakespeare on the air. In that year it also produced classic Victorian melodramas like East Lynne.

By 1930, having progressed to Ibsen, NBC formed a Radio Guild, boldly undertook to produce one play a week, 52 weeks in the year. For several years one man, Vernon Radcliff, adapted every play, directed every performance. NBC, prospering in the great Depression, gave him enough money to allow productions of Galsworthy, Barrie, George S. Kaufman.

By 1938 another type of radio drama was in full flower, especially at CBS: the original radio script, with its narrators, its musical "bridges," its fade-outs, fade-ins, sound effects. Daytime serials had long since arrived.

Another arrival in radio about this time was "the educational tie-up" by which networks displayed their utility and virtue. Colleges listened as NBC's "Great Plays Series," successor to the Radio Guild, started off in 1938 and in 1938-39 went on a grand tour of the ages, opening with Blanche Yurka in The Trojan Women. Other items that year: Moliere, Tolstoi and George Bernard Shaw's own adaptation of Back to Methuselah. In the last three years this sort of thing has been overshadowed by commercial radio theaters, the fresh work of the Columbia Workshop, variety shows.

Last week NBC producers and directors, meditating on the twelve-year experience, wondered if the future belonged to "original" radio writing (many examples of which have not exceeded the talents of a smart high-school boy), or if the classic works of the theater would again be broadcast. Conceding that about one in 20 of their past productions had had truly professional finish, they agreed on certain requirements for future radio playhouses. One requirement: more than the six to seven hours of rehearsal that are now routine.

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