Radio: Genius’s Hour

NBC’s one-man dramatic workshop is a 30-year-old, hornrimmed, half-pint scrivener named Arch Oboler, who in the last five years has written some 200 radio plays, cast many of them, directed some of them standing on a table so the actors could see him. About Arch Oboler are many unmistakable marks of genius. His inspiration is the music of the masters; amid the correct mufti of staid Radio City he sports Hollywood-style polo shirts, violent jackets, unpressed bags; in his atelier he kept a pet horned toad until last weekend it died after overdoing a diet of worms.

This sort of front, plus a prodigious capacity for turning out ideas and listenable plays, make Arch Oboler NBC’s No. 1 Wonder Boy. His start toward such a ranking goes back to a bundle of estimable playlets he turned out in 1934-35 for the Grand Hotel program. This got him an NBC job writing for Rudy Vallee’s hour, as well as a Wednesday after-midnight radio dreadful called Lights Out. After two eldritch years, during which Lights Out collected a batch of eerie-minded fan clubs and curdled more next-door neighbors than any program on the air, Arch Oboler left the series in other hands, feeling that not even he could top the high in horror he had by then achieved.

Since March, Arch Oboler has been writing, casting, directing, dabbling with radio tricks and sound effects, in a Saturday night play series specializing in “emotional conflict.” To last Saturday’s, NBC paid special attention, giving a full hour for the first time, and using the NBC symphony orchestra for the first time in a dramatic show. Reason: sixtyish Alia Nazimova, Stanislavsky-trained, Ibsenite and cinema siren, had been won to radio.

For the occasion, Playwright Oboler had constructed This Lonely Heart, a doloroso radio fluoroscoping of the troubled soul of Tschaikowsky’s ever-loving patroness, Mme von Meek (Nazimova).

Grey-bobbed Nazimova took to the microphone like a trouper reclaimed for a Billy Rose floor show, emoted copiously in black slacks in an audience-less studio, wasted wordily away at the finish like a traditional Camille. Mightily pleased with the play, the playwright and a medium which let her hold most of the stage for a full hour without a single program or gum wrapper crackling, Alia Nazimova let out a secret. “Always,” she confessed, “I have hated audiences. Always!”