Radio Stage: The Theatre of the Air
This is a guest post by New York Public Radio Archives' Summer 2023 Intern, Sam Seliger.
Past and future broadcast historians could be forgiven for skipping over a WNYC show that totaled barely 50 hours of material, given the station’s almost 100 years of prestigious radio history and countless awards. But The Radio Stage was not just any show, even by WNYC’s lofty standards.
The program's short run time and comparatively few episodes bely the amount of production work undertaken for it. Creator Marjorie Van Halteren began working on it in 1986, producing two half-hour demos, and she spent the next two years creating the other nine episodes of the first season, which debuted in April of 1989.[1] All but one of the 11 plays were newly written for the program, and they were all recorded live before an audience, typically with live sound effects and/or music.
Van Halteren already had quite an impressive resume, having worked on numerous WNYC programs and multiple nationally-broadcast radio shows; she had won three Peabody awards before her 40th birthday.[2] Yet the professional performers and drama companies that appeared on The Radio Stage were almost uniformly new to radio and audio-only performance. Van Halteren’s team included a cohort of experienced technical and production professionals. Prominent among them was longtime radio sound effect specialist Al Schaffer, as well as WNYC engineer Jane Pipik, who as technical directors led a rotating cast of highly experienced audio technicians.
Early episodes captured this unique intersection of professional expertise with the novelty of the form and performance style. In the cold open for the second episode, Kafka’s Radio by Eric Overmeyer, actor Terry Caza admitted it was the most nervous he had ever been before a live performance, noting that “I’ve stood on a lot of stages, but never behind this much radio equipment before.”
The Radio Stage updated the radio play, a staple of broadcasts of the 1940s and 50s, with the new production possibilities of the day and brought it into the world of contemporary theater. Radio dramas of old were known for their live sound effects, as sound men creatively used everyday objects to enliven stories for audiences that had to imagine everything beyond music and dialogue. Schaffer helped establish these norms back in the 1940s as a sound effects man at CBS, and he brought a traditional, medium-specific know-how to the program that the rest of the staff admired.[3] His use of coconut shells for horse hooves may have been a visual gag for Monty Python, yet it remained perfect for radio.
While Radio Stage productions trusted the realism of reliable, practical sound effects, modern developments in sound technology offered new possibilities. For David Stephen Rappaport’s aptly-titled Sound, in which an empowered audio technician meddles with the sound effects of the physical universe, engineer Bob Kinkle used three different digital samplers. Modern audio technologies also expanded the show’s production resources more broadly. Engineers recorded on multi-track audio tape that was unavailable in the 1940s;[4] one play set entirely around a dinner table was recorded using a 360-degree surround sound technology called Ambisonics in order to create a more immersive experience; sound processing effects were also widely used to create the impression that actors were being heard over the telephone or from a specific physical environment.
Particularly in the first season, the idea of sound as a medium was a recurring theme across several plays. In Darrah Cloud’s Scanners, the radio itself was one of the characters, as a snowbound couple attempt to negotiate their only access to the outside world. Sound spoke implicitly about the importance of sounds for providing order in people’s lives, and the confusion that could occur when sounds were not simulated realistically. One can imagine that Schaffer appreciated such a plot.
After the first 11 episodes aired in the spring of 1989, the show received a Silver Award for Broadcasting Excellence from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The whole series was aired again two years later, concluding with two new plays. Expanding from a half-hour to a full hour-long slot, it returned for a third season at the start of 1992, featuring six brand new works and 13 new productions of existing works. All of the programs were made available for non-commercial radio stations across the country through the Pacifica Program Service distribution network.[5] Under new producer Sarah Montague, another seven-show run came in 1996, distributed by NPR Playhouse;[6] the final episodes included one last set of three programs in January of 1999, and two holiday specials that December.
Van Halteren and Montague got scripts from all over the theater scene. Some playwrights, such as Rappaport, were new and largely unknown at the time, but others were already successful in their own right. Elizabeth Swados had premiered her song cycle The Beautiful Lady, about an early 20th-century Russian literary circle that congregated at the cafe of the same name, at New York’s famed La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club a few years before bringing it on the air.[7] Adreanne Kennedy, who penned the vampire tale The Dramatic Circle, had been among the most groundbreaking playwrights of the era since her 1964 Obie-winning experimental debut Funnyhouse of a Negro, although she was denied a Broadway production of her work until last year.[8]
Many of the creators featured on the program were rising stars who went on to even greater success. Nicole Burdette wrote Pagans in Limbo for the 1992 season and The Burden of Destiny for 1996; she later adapted her play Chelsea Walls into a film directed by Ethan Hawke.[9] Suzan-Lori Parks won major acclaim, including an Obie award, for her first full-length play, the absurdist Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, which was adapted for The Radio Stage after its off-Broadway debut, and aired during the 1992 season. A decade later, her play Topdog/Underdog was the first work by a Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. (Parks was also a finalist for the award in 2000 and 2015)[10] Suzan-Lori Parks has become arguably America’s leading living playwright, named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2023, and the The Radio Stage ran one of the earliest productions of her first full-length work.[11]
A variety of production companies and performance groups were involved in bringing the plays to life. Of course, many came from the city’s experimental and off-Broadway scenes; renowned groups such as the Acting Company and the Ensemble Studio Theatre produced one or two shows in almost every season. New Dramatists, a prominent playwrights organization, was among the most common collaborators and helped supply many of the works. But organizations also came from both outside the city and outside the world of professional theater: several shows were produced with companies from Connecticut and Pennsylvania, and one, Joe’s Takes the Radio Stage, was written by inmates at a New Jersey juvenile institution.[12]
While some plays and productions stayed relatively true to the old-school radio play style, with a slightly campier approach and more performative style (this was particularly true of the noirs), others were often more modern and frequently somewhat experimental. J. Rufus Caleb’s coming-of-age story The Devil and Uncle Asa used a non-linear approach, diving deep into the narrator’s memory across time and space, while his The Rehearsal presented an imagined conversation between Little Richard and his young band member Jimi Hendrix, told almost entirely through dialogue and music.
It is surprising that such an innovative show, which was also a cauldron of blockbuster talent, is largely absent from the broadcasting research canon, or that information about it seems so scarce. There is no Wikipedia entry for The Radio Stage, nor a mention of it in the Wikipedia entry for “radio drama,” and the show is only mentioned in passing a few times in WNYC’s website. Similarly, there seem to be no entries for the show in the Library of Congress web site, nor in the federated library catalog WorldCat. This is probably due to the show’s relatively short life.
The Radio Stage had a complicated production process; high production costs were a recurring problem, and each episode could only air so many times. Obtaining copyright clearances on the recordings presents a major hitch in our ability to make the recordings available on demand, so its online presence is mostly limited to catalog entries in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Unknown streaming rights and new media platforms are also a reason that we can’t put any episodes up as the audio portion of this article.
Radio drama has existed since nearly the inception of the medium. Clearly indebted to shows such as National Public Radio’s Earplay, as well as other efforts in commercial radio stations, The Radio Stage harked back to the genre’s origins (most notably by including a live audience), while also allowing both experienced and emerging artists to breathe new life into an old form. As producer Sarah Montague said about the 10th anniversary season in 1996, “the theatre of the air is a medium both infinite and intimate, bringing the furthest reaches of a writer’s imagination to the ear of a single listener.”[13]
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[1] Glick, Andrea. “Wired for Drama,” WNYC Wavelength, WNYC Foundation, April 1989, pg 8-9.
[2] “Off The Air: With Marjorie Van Halteren, Independent Radio Producer.” WNYC Wavelength, WNYC Foundation, May 1989, pg 5.
[3] Glick, “Wired for Drama.”
[4] At a full one-inch wide with eight channels, these were akin to using four regular ¼ in reels at once.
[5] The Radio Stage season 3 brochure. WNYC Communications Group, 1992.
[6] The Radio Stage season 4 brochure. WNYC Communications Group, 1996.
[7] Reside, Douglas. “Elizabeth Swados’s ‘The Beautiful Lady’ in the Archive.” NYPL Blog, New York Public Library, June 23, 2023.
[8] Weigand, Chris. “Adrienne Kennedy on Meeting the Beatles and Losing Control of Her Play.” The Guardian, January 6, 2023.
[9] “Faculty: Nicole Burdette.” The New School; College of Performing Arts, School of Drama.
[10] Brandman, Mariana. “Suzan-Lori Parks Biography.” National Women’s History Museum, January, 2021.
[11] Brown, Sterling K. “Suzan-Lori Parks is on the 2023 TIME 100 List.” Time Magazine, April 13, 2023.
[12] The Radio Stage season 3 brochure. WNYC Communications Group, 1992.
[13] The Radio Stage season 4 brochure. WNYC Communications Group, 1996.
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