Radio: Best Plays

Radio script writers last week were finally honored by a critical anthology. The Writer’s Radio Theater 1940-1941* by Norman S. Weiser. The compiler, dramatic editor of Radio Daily, did for the first time in radio about the same thing that Burns Mantle has been doing since 1909 for the Broadway theater. One difference was that Weiser’s ten “best” radio plays of the year* could be printed uncut. Other differences were many in the plays themselves.

The fact that nobody ever pays a nickel to hear a radio play has had a determining influence on radio scripts and script writers. It means that the usual radio play gets no direct response from the customers, very little from impartial reviewers. Radiomen like to talk as if their stuff were attuned to the twitch of intangible millions, but the truth is that no box office and few critics exist.

This leaves radio playwriting an art in a vacuum, inhabited solely by writers, producers, performers and sponsors. A sense of the vacuum sometimes reduces the writer’s respect for his audience to the sponsor’s commercial level. Or the writer may be luckier than most showmen ever are. He may work for a sponsor, or for a broadcasting company, liberal enough to encourage first-class, spirited work in a medium of unplumbed possibilities.

Columbia did this in 1936 when it gave time and money to the famed Columbia Workshop, and Anthologist Weiser considers that radio dramatic writing as an art began about then. His ten plays show that it is still a short-pants, if lusty, art. The selectees (awarded Harper Prizes in the form of scrolls):

Red Death, by veteran Script Writer Ruth Earth, done for Du Font’s Cavalcade of America. A melodramatization, missing no tricks, of the U.S. Public Health Service’s conquest of pellagra.

Man-Made Waterways, written for Columbia’s American School of the Air by Hans Christian Adamson. A competent, cheerful educational script for students and South Americans.

Ben Hur, by Elpha Anita Ellington, produced on Mutual’s Command Performance series. From Lew Wallace via Hollywood, with inspirational dialogue.

Mr. Ginsburg, by Arch Oboler for his Everyman’s Theater series over NBC. A “stream of consciousness” item, hokum no matter how you build it—and Master Oboler builds it like crazy.

Kathryn Howard, by Jean Holloway, for Helen Menken on the Kate Smith Hour. Henry VIII and his fifth queen in a struggle of wills before her execution, proving that good theater may be good radio.

Words Without Music, by Norman Corwin for Columbia. A half-hour of poetic comedy with Arnold’s Dover Beach tossed in for good measure.

Bid for Happiness, by Therese Lewis and Lota Kriendler, for Helen Hayes. A cleverly strung idyl of parting and reconciliation, just what was in the tea leaves for Actress Hayes.

Seems Radio Is Here to Stay, by Norman Corwin for Columbia. Meandering celebration of radio’s miracle in good-humored, if not good, free verse.

Plain Mr. President, by Dwight Irving Cooke, for the Cavalcade of America. Washington on his coach ride from Mount Vernon to Manhattan, with Revolutionary War episodes fading in. Effective job.

The Ghost Walks Again, by Jerry Devine for Mutual’s The Shadow series. A creepy fantasy for kids.

*Harper; $2.

-* NBC refused permission to reprint sustaining shows.