Yesterday an Incident Occurred

Producers and other professionals at the BBC used to talk informally about the "play to Hoover to" and the "play to clear lunch to." The idea was that the former's quality was so low that it didn't matter much if one heard all (or any) of it. The latter encompassed most of the higher-quality programming, but even this better stuff did not require a great deal of attention; clearing the dishes from lunch still involves some distracting clatter and a partial removal of one's mind from the play. It seems that all too infrequently did a play rise to the level of the play to simply sit down and listen to.

As I listen to more plays, I am developing my own critical vocabulary based on the hoover/dishes distinction. I have plays to mow the lawn to (with a manual push mower--not as loud as power mowers, so a basic farce or thriller play can withstand the noise), plays to rake leaves to, plays to do dishes to, and plays to hand or fold laundry to. Beckett, Dylan Thomas, and the Welles/Mercury/Campbell group are the only writers or producers of radio drama who have led me to sit down and listen without performing any accompanying housework. And even Beckett sometimes only rises to the level of the play to sift compost to (the most meditative and least distracting of all household chores or yard work.

In a way, I do not think that my tendency to form these categories (or, rather, to use radio drama thusly as aural accompaniment to other, more primary tasks) fairly denigrates the art form. If one can justify radio's blindness in artistic terms and argue successfully that its lack of visuals is not an aesthetic shortcoming, it is also true that this blindness encourages listeners to fill their visual field with some other activity. These other activities are often distracting. But then other artistic experiences offer their own distractions. I vividly recall not only the August Wilson play Jitney but also the incessant chattering of the many old couples watching the play with me in the Alley Theatre; not only the film 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould but also the make-out session in a carport that followed it; not only the film Wolf (okay, maybe that one is less vivid) but also the feeling of sweating and thinking I would pass out from the heat in the balcony of the sold-out Kabuki theater (and also the news footage of O.J.'s Bronco that I had been watching earlier in the day in that month of my high-school graduation. The point is, there is no such thing as the artistic experience that occurs in an isolated, pressurized chamber--no more for the consumer of art than for the producer. Far from lessening my experience of Mercury's Les Miserable or Thomas's Under Milk Wood, the dishes I washed or the leaves I raked while listening to those plays has only bound the two activities in my mind, so that those tedious household chores now bear the imaginative echo of the more memorable aural accompaniment they once shared.

That said, I would like to maintain the rating system based on household chores, and I am currently trying to apply an evaluative chore to the play Yesterday An Incident Occurred by Mark Ravenhill, which is the latest BBC offering that I've heard. For me it is technically a play to do the dishes to, and I haven't quite finished the play yet because my dishes ran out. It may be a sign of the play's quality that I did not extend it by moving on to folding the clothes that have been on the drying rack for the last two weeks. That is, by the time I had finished the dishes and listened to 30-40 minutes of it, I didn't think too highly of Yesterday An Incident Occurred.

When the play began, it actually seemed that it might be one for sitting down in a darkened room. Ravenhill, the author of Shopping and Fucking, seemed to take this commission (for BBC 3's "Free Thinking festival of ideas in Liverpool") seriously, and he seemed to understand the demands of the medium very well. The play was recorded, in the words of the online description from the BBC's website, "in the atmospheric Victorian civil court of St Georges Hall," which not only provides a great acoustic effect through the echoes of an imperial-era courtroom but also lends symbolic weight to the play's topic: the overreaching of the British justice system in the wake of Al-qaeda terrorist attacks. The play is formally stylized in a very nice way, with an Orwellian or Kafkaesque panel of vague authority figures leading cheers of "hurrah," chanted and repeated by the large-sounding live audience, after each statement of patriotic bromides. These go from benign and easily supportable to increasingly sinister and indefensible as the play goes on amid growing hysteria over an allegorical assault upon an innocent civilian.

The problem with the play is that its plot and the ideas it develops cannot match Ravenhill's formal and technical proficiency. While I was expecting the "Free Thinking" festival to present challenging ideas, this play offered only a predictable warning against the overreactions of those who seek safety through punitive measures like branding of those who fail to report on neighbors suspected of terrorism. While such seemingly absurd legal measures may indeed have their real-life equivalents in American torture policies and in the very aggressive security measures being implemented in the UK, by now the sort of people who listen to programs like BBC 3's festival of ideas are well aware of these excesses. And in any event, the play provides little human interest to sustain the heavy-handed lesson it is presenting. The characters are deliberately flat (the "man in the yellow tie," who ostensibly emerges out of the live, studio audience and into the spotlight as the reluctant informer who then demands his own punishment; the innocent object of the evil terrorist, who hates everything that his victim stands for); and part of the point is certainly that the media in a "democratic society" creates such caricatures of good and evil. But pointing this out does not make a great play, and this one seems to have little else to offer.

It seems that the enduring problem that radio drama faces is not the fact that listeners are almost inevitably distracted during broadcasts. What I am more concerned about is the perceived need to center plays on politics and current events. This may be a natural tendency on a medium that has such a vital role in presenting news. And the play of ideas can certainly come off well--I enjoyed the L.A. production of Shaw's Doctor's Dilemma very much. But many of the BBC plays push a message without attending to the artistic merit of the story.

Seeing it Through

I just finished listening to Seeing it Through by Neil Brand, which BBC Radio 3 broadcast a week or two ago. It was about Charles Masterman and the de facto ministry of information that he led for England during WWI. It is one of those history plays that is not terribly interesting formally--the play's function is more a presentation of ideas (the disingenuous justifications for England's entry into the war, which could have been avoided; the potential benefits and drawbacks of propaganda) than an artistically innovative drama.

I did admire the way in which intervals in the play were filled with Anglican hymns (wish I knew enough about those hymns to know which one(s)), equating the secular propaganda put out by Masterman and his stable of writers (Arnold Bennett, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, and other very prominent Edwardian authors) with the spiritual justifications for Britain's imperialist adventures.

The play may also be interesting for me down the road because H.G. Wells plays a very prominent part as a somewhat reluctant participant in Masterman's initiative and a frequent sparring partner with him. Wells, by now a utopian thinker and eugenist, believes that a philosopher-king class should openly broadcast acknowledged propaganda in order to lead people towards the greater good.

German Theatre in America

So I saw the Schimmelphennig play Start Up three days ago and should write something about it before it fades from my memory. Not that it wasn't memorable, but it was not the groundbreaking, eye-opening experience I was expecting from one of Europe's hottest young dramatists, as yet undiscovered in the States. The play actually felt dated more than anything--not necessarily in a bad way. My strongest impression was of 1970s American plays, especially Sam Shepard, with a hint of Mamet here and there in the form of phatic phrases traded between characters in a rhythmic, subtly musical way. I guess one could say that in this play, in which three Germans set out to bring German culture to Americans but end up falling under the spell of American culture and abandoning their plan, it is somewhat interesting that the successful German playwright is getting his idea of America from a now-historical American theatrical tradition. If aping Shepard, Mamet, and Death of a Salesman was a deliberate choice, it would go along with the play's theme of the stereotypes that we acquire from our mediated lives in which countries increasingly exist for us in their movie versions, or in the impression we get of them through the news.

We notice the presence of Sam Shepard in the journey-quest of a group of young people into the mythic but corrupted American West. The synopsis of the play on the troupe's Web site says that the three Germans (the couple Kati and Rob and their friend Micha) have landed in "Anytown, USA" after a long trip on their private bus. The anonymity of the place and of the fairly flat characters they meet (Ike, a mildly philosophical but ultimately business-minded property owner who rents them a storefront for their theater, and his daughter Liz, who has become intellectually and sexually liberated in college) rings of Shepard or Wallace Shawn. And Ike's promotion of entrepreneurship and of turning a profit as the greatest goods, with a sober recognition that many such ventures will fail, seems to channel Horatio Alger by way of Willy Loman and Glengarry Glen Ross.

The greatest updating of these perennial American themes comes with the show's gimmick, which is that the play about three Germans traveling around the country, trying to sell German theater to Americans, is being performed by a group of Germans (and two American actors, and two Austrian video artists) traveling around the country on a bus. The video footage that is projected on the screen at times during the play is constantly updated as the group travels around the country. Certain very Shepard-like monologues, often involving a fairly heavy-handed description of a dramatic and significant near-miss at a railroad crossing, are pieced together from fragments of the speeches that the actors recorded at humorous places visited along their tour (a minor-league baseball stadium, closed for the off-season, where the famished Rob futilely searches for an open concession stand; a tourist-trap wild-west village; a kitschy antique shop filled with American-flag festooned knick-knacks). I called this a gimmick, and it can appear to be merely an advantageous use of advances in computer technology--to the left of the stage was a table where three or four crew members sat before Apple lap tops, controlling the video and sound projection. But the role of media is an important and interesting element of the play. About midway through, Micha, who has been left at the storefront while the others search for food, suddenly stands before a podium with a microphone, addressing a lecture on German-American relations to the audience. It is full of iconic images of the invasion of Normandy, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Berlin Airlift, and prominent members of the George W. Bush administration. While these images chart the ebb and flow of friendliness and cooperation between the two countries over the past sixty years, they also illustrate the role of mediated images in forming our perception and knowledge of these two nations. The Americans' knowledge of Germany mostly comes through these history-book images (and a single German film, Das Boot), while the Germans' understanding of America comes mainly through western films and more recent media images (a news magazine photograph of Colon Powell holding up the infamous vial of radioactive material figures prominently in Micha's history slideshow, as he comments on the cooling of German-American relations after Germany's post-9/11 support of America's military action in Afghanistan).

This idea of media-produced caricatures of countries and cultures becomes focused on the business that the Germans wish to start. While his compatriots waver in their support of the theater venture, Micha remains firm, idealistically believing that an offer of true German culture (which, however, the play never defines or depicts) will be welcomed by the populace of this nameless American town. Ike, however, takes the position of market populism in insisting that the Germans provide a service defined by already existing demand--either a gas station, a hot dog stand, or a video store. Rob, whether because of hunger-induced weakness or the seductions of Ike's American-dream rhetoric, begins to welcome the video store idea, but even he is dismayed by the logical conclusion of Ike's demand-driven business plan, which it turns out will lead their video store to provide a predominantly erotic selection, given the rental history of another video store that once occupied the same storefront. This conclusion offers a pessimistic commentary on both the logic of free market capitalism and the potential for quality culture in Anytown, USA. Yet, the German actors end up riding off into the sunset, with Kati choosing to stay behind with Ike while Liz and Micha (after hooking up for comically acrobatic sex while they were alone in the storefront), along with Rob, journey off into the great American unknown, much as these actors are doing as they head off to El Paso and other points west on their way to Los Angeles.

Welles the Magician

I have been listening again to War of the Worlds, since I'll be playing it for my students next Monday (in preparation for our dip into radio drama with Beckett's All That Fall a few weeks later). I have also started reading H.G. Wells' novel for the first time. It's interesting to notice how the novel deals with communications technology, with the telegraphs and news reports doing only a moderately good job of informing Londoners of the invasion taking place nearby; and Wells also seems to criticize the metropolis's short-sightedness in assuming that nothing beyond the city limits can possibly have much importance. Perhaps this is why Howard Koch (and Welles? I don't remember what his involvement was in planning the adaptation) chose to make this particular adaption centered on the medium of radio. In the radio play, the communications are instantaneous and far more effective. Yet, given the response of some of the listening public, perhaps Wells' original satire was just updated to a new technology.

I finished War while washing dishes and didn't have anything new downloaded to the iPod, so I started listening again to the 7-part Les Miserables by Welles' Mercury Theatre on the Air. My God, that is good stuff. The sound effects, like a distant army advancing over a hill or a bomber plane coming through some far-off clouds, make the opening sequences incredibly dramatic--an exemplary use of sound. And Welles' voice as the narrator is virtually unrecognizable and pitch-perfect. A work of art.

American radio drama factories

I am reading Ian Rodger's 1982 book Radio Drama (London: MacMillan), which is on loan from Stephen F. Austin University and due back shortly. Rodger was a writer and reviewer (for The Listener) of radio plays. His book begins with the usual lamentations over the lack of critical attention devoted to radio plays, despite their relatively large audience when compared to stage production. He provides an interesting, if fairly unoriginal, perspective on the effects of the mass audience on radio writing. Rodger contrasts pre-broadcasting literatures, such as the stage play and the novel, with broadcasting: the former, aimed at a limited audience, could presume that its readership or audience did not include certain sectors of society, such as servants and peasants, and that it could therefore make fun of such people, upon whom it did not depend for its commercial success. With radio, however, audiences broadened, and the writer was forced to engage in the much more difficult task of appealing across social classes. Generally Rodger seems to see this as a good development; he seems critical of the exclusionary literature of past ages. But there are interesting moment in which he indicates that the products of such new pressures must be artistically weakened.

One such moment, which may have some relevance for discussions of Orson Welles' radio work (given his self-promotion as the auteur versus his actual role as merely one of many collaborators working on his Mercury and Campbell broadcasts), concerns the effects of commercial sponsorship on American radio drama. Rodger quotes Eckhard Breitinger's industrially tinged description of American radio drama authorship: “Commercial sponsoring and commercial forms of production [...] implies an implementation of industrial modes of manufacturing scripts by using dialoguers and the almost mechanical assembling of individual scenes or parts of a programme by different hands into a ‘unified whole.” Rodger goes on to comment on Breitinger's assessment, continuing the industiral metaphor, “Such factory conditions obviously precluded the free expression of the individual artist and rarely encouraged work of intellectual integrity” (30).

That "intellectual integrity" is the highest aim of art is not a universally accepted proposition, and it may be a problematic one in radio art. As Michele Hilmes writes in Radio Voices, radio often projected false images of the individual artist, such as Welles, whose intellectual integrity purportedly created programs that, in fact, resulted from widespread collaboration. In discussing American radio drama, Rodger acknowledges the help that Welles had, referring to "Howard Koch's adapation of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells" (31), which Welles "produced." But elsewhere he upholds the concept of the individual artistic creator, singling out Archibald MacLeish for rare praise among American radio artists. It seems important that MacLeish is a poet, the model for the isolated, creative individual (Rodger quotes MacLeish's advocacy of poetic radio writing, "The eye is a realist [...] the ear is already half poet" [31]); and here he maintains MacLeish's status as sole originator of The Fall of the City by representing Irving Reis's role as merely a solicitor of the work: "Irving Reis initiated poetic drama on radio when he invited Archibald MacLeish to write The Fall of the City. I don't know if Reis's role was really this limited, but the extremely collaborative nature of radio production would make one suspect that MacLeish was only one piece of the creative puzzle.

This issue of the genesis of radio works seems to be an important one. Rodger elsewhere celebrates the "sense of community" that produces radio broadcasts, whereby "producers, actors, technicians and writers collaborate rather than compete. There is a swift and open exchange of ideas in an atmosphere of mutual respect which is not common in the theatre or film and television studios" (4). But where is the line which, once crossed, signals the transition from product of happy collaboration to a precluding of "the free expression of the individual artist"? Rodger seems to place the line somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. He justifies this nationalized evaluation of artistic integrity through the reasoning that America was even more diverse than England, requiring an extremely monotone drama that would not offend or confuse any listeners. This seems to make sense. And I don't know that I would argue against the harmful effects of sponsorship on artistic creation. Still, the concept of the individual artist seems to come under serious attack with the mass media, and I don't know that Rodger interrogates this concept fully enough.

Rodger does, however, have an interesting observation about the use of narrators in American radio drama. Staying on his theme of the ethnically diverse American audience, Rodger notes that such “random and disparate audiences required a genial interlocutor to lead them into the dramatized scenes" (30). Although he doesn't specifically mention Welles in connection to this narrating function, Welles seems to be one such "genial interlocutor," particularly given his interest in uniting listeners of different races and national origins under some idea of American (and more broadly defined Western) culture.

The Doctor's Dilemma, Part 2

I finished listening to Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma, which ended up being great fun (it started out that way as well). It seems that the play was conventionally staged and merely recorded for radio; either this, or the actors engaged in a moderate amount of action. The giveaway is a scene in which one of the doctors is asking the artist if the latter can repay money that the former has lent. The audience began laughing as the artist apparently searched futilely through his pockets for money (a very non radiogenic scene).

The plot of the satirical play concerns several doctors, each of whom seems to be more pompous and yet less medically apt than the last. They each have been knighted for supposedly groundbreaking scientific advances, all of which are clearly ineffective at best, and detrimental to patients' health at worst. They are good natured enough, however. The central character, Sir Colenso Ridgeon, has just been knighted for his advances in immunology, and the play introduces the other doctors who have come to congratulate him. As some of these well-wishers are departing, a woman comes in to plead with Ridgeon to help her tubercular husband Louis Dubedat. Ridgeon says he is full up with patients and cannot possibly take another, unless Mrs. Dubedat can convince him that her husband is worth saving. Mrs. Dubedat then shows Sir Colenso a drawing of herself that her husband has done, and whether he admires more its apparent artistic merit or its image of the beautiful young wife, Sir Colenso agrees that Louis is, indeed, worth saving. This is good news for the Dubedats but bad news for a doctor friend of Sir Colenso's, the single non-knighted visitor, who is a failure because he is too good and honest to join the medical swindle in which his colleagues have happily immersed themselves.

Sir Colenso's choice to save the genius artist due to his contribution to society seems sound, until we meet Louis. In fact, before an audience is introduced to him, we hear the doctors' relation of their first meeting with the young artist, who has stolen something or borrowed money from each during the course of their dinner. Louis, it turns out, is a scoundrel, though a clever and talented one. When he appears on stage, confronted by the doctors who have now gotten a good read of his character, his sophistry almost convinces us that the true artist is justified in whatever anti-social actions he undertakes. Almost. Indeed, the doctors, who are as likely to kill their patients as to save them, seem to be in no moral position to condemn Louis for profiting by trickery. Here seems to be the typical Shavian move (as far as I can gather it from having seen or heard only two plays), to force the audience to define their own version of morality in the midst of an apparent moral vacuum. To complicate this dilemma further, Sir Colenso has fallen in love with Mrs. Dubedat and decides that he will save his good doctor friend and pass the artist off to a colleague, whose quack cure will certainly kill Mr. Dubedat. In the end, Dubedat dies, but Mrs. Dubedat marries another man, and her late husband has the last laugh.

The play introduces an interesting mix of Victorian atmosphere (the old doctors are clearly the old Victorian guard, and the scene of Dubedat's "beautiful" death has a highly Victorian coloring) and modernist moral ambiguity.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, this production worked very well on radio. The characters' personalities are revealed perfectly through their voices (although Mrs. Dubedat, whose lush voice at first provides a pleasant illustration of her sensuous beauty, becomes distractingly maudlin at times), and the mode of the play--a moral argument between conflicting perspectives--is well suited to radio's bent for controversy and debate.

Roland Schimmelpfennig

A week and a day from now, I'll be going to see a play by Roland Schimmelpfennig at Vortex Theatre, here in Austin. The publicity from the theatre calls him "Germany's foremost contemporary playwright, and this interview on New York Theatre Wire concurs, calling him "one of the most prolific and heralded young dramatists in Europe." It also notes that he is relatively unknown in America, and indeed I had never heard of him.

The play, Start Up, seems to be at least partially about some venture to sell German culture to Americans, and the troupe performing the play is putting a metatheatrical spin on the work by performing it as part of an American tour through relative backwaters of American culture--i.e., they're not performing solely in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. So they (3 German actors and 2 American ones, an Austrian video artists, and a few assorted others) are bringing some German culture to uncultured Americans (hello, Austin). As they travel across the states, they are recording their trip and then working the recordings into the plays so that the performance is different each time.

The interview linked to above has an interesting discussion of another of Schimmelpfenig's plays, Die Frau von Frueher (The Woman Before), which was playing in New York at the time the interview was published. The interviewer calls the play very cinematic in its transitions between locations and times. Schimmelpfennig mentions that in its European productions voiceovers or signs signaled the changes in time, but that was not done in New York, making it more cinematic. There are also periodic blackouts of the stage, with single characters remaining in the foreground to narrate, an effect that Schimmelpfennig compares to a Greek chorus.

Well, we will see next week how Start Up is. This performance seems as if it will be a unique experience in any event.

The Doctor's Dilemma

...He is picking up signals from

countries where the last transmission
took place light years ago. This is how

he learns about light years and how time
equals distance and distance is a kind

of salvation. He wants to come to America,
home of the faint signal, land of stolen

elegance....

-Dionisio D. Martinez
"Across These Landscapes of Early Darkness"

A poem I read today in The Best American Poetry 1992, and not related at all to the subject of this post, G.B. Shaw's play The Doctor's Dilemma, the audio version of which I've been listening to this evening. It was produced by L.A. Theatre Works, and the first half, at least, is excellent. I think I read somewhere (maybe in one of the essays in Peter Lewis' Radio Drama collection) that Shaw is supposed to be one of the authors whose plays transfer well to radio. Not having seen this play before (I think, in fact, that Major Barbara is the only Shaw play that I've seen), I don't know if this production altered the text at all for radio, but so far there doesn't seem to be much action that has needed to be described through dialogue. Instead, it seems almost completely to rely on dialogue.

I find myself wondering if I'm missing much by listening to and not seeing the play. Thinking of The Seagull, which I saw last Monday, Chekhov's plays could work fairly well on radio in the sense that the dialogue alone can carry the play. Yet so much of Chekhov's genius is in his choreography--the way in which he balances the different groupings of characters on the stage. The movement of bodies is crucial to the play's effect, if it is staged effectively. Shaw, in this play at least, does not seem to have the same stage dynamics that Chekhov does. Whereas Chekhov creates architectonic relationships among different ages, genders, occupations, social classes, etc., Shaw seems more interested in having his characters serve as mouthpieces for a variety of comic opinions. Certainly there seems to be a variety of status (the many successful doctors versus the poor doctor who is a failure because he is the only one to adhere to his principles) and of age, but these distinctions come across through the variety of voices of the radio actors. I suppose the same could be done with Chekhov--different vocal colors to express the different characters' qualities. That is to say, I suppose that most transformations between media will find compensations for the loss of the source medium's capabilities.

The Last Day of the War

I've been making my way through Erik Barnouw's collection of radio plays titled Radio Drama in Action (1945). The latest one that I've read is "The Last Day of the War" by Sergeant Arthur Laurents. Like many of the plays in this collection, it reads like wartime propaganda, although aside from one or two complaints about fascists who want to ruin the American way of life, this one is short on pro-war content, limiting itself to an informative analysis of the challenges facing soldiers who are returning home.

The play focuses on one soldier named Mickey Ryan who has been seriously wounded by shrapnel from a shell that exploded near him. The play's title refers, in one sense to the day on which Mickey's second leg is amputated, but in another to the paradoxical fact that Mickey's real battle is only beginning once the war is over. To make this paradox clear, the play is bracketed by two different but equally vivid sounds, the first representing battlefield combat
(Mickey's injury is signaled by "The long shrill scream of a shell [which] explodes violently on mike"). The play ends with a different sound, that of Mickey slowly mounting three steps with the aid of crutches and his new wooden legs. The end seems very moving and highly effective--clearly this is among the higher quality pieces of wartime propaganda.

One way in which the play clearly takes advantage of its medium is through a representation of Mickey's body that creates a distinct sense of its presence and size. Mickey is described as large: "big, lazy shoulders, strong thighs" (93), and this rough sketch of his bulk is soon expressed far more precisely: "He's 5 feet 11. He weighs 178 pounds and that ain't hay to the pill rollers who carry him on a litter 650 yards to the batallion aid station" (94). This sketch, with its numerically exact "178 pounds," presents an interesting combination of abstract measurement and palpable weight, as we sympathize with the burden of these "pill rollers." The measurements and descriptions of his size, of course, set up the later description of his diminishment upon double amputation. After the first leg is amputated, the narrator refers to Mickey's remaining leg as "that limb which still makes Mickey Ryan 5 feet 11" (97). The remaining leg contracts gangrene, however, and "Mickey Ryan didn't stand 5 feet 11 any more" (102).

As the play moves toward its concluding message of the importance of Mickey's inner transformation, it deemphasizes physical change in favor of a psychological focus. And in this focus the play takes advantage of its medium's ability to alter our perception of reality through speech. Immediately after the narrator's announcement that Mickey is not "5 feet 11 any more," Mickey's wife enters the hospital for her first visit since his injury. Following the narrator's physical description of her--"A little blonde kid dressed in woman's clothes, nervously twisting the very thin gold band on her third finger, left hand"--the woman introduces herself to a major, providing a concise drama of the inner turmoil surrounding her identity and her relationship to Mickey: "I'm Margie Ryan . . . Mrs. Ryan . . . Mickey Ryan's wife" (102). In radio, speech must indicate identity (in the absence of visual clues that would help the audience of a stage play or film). Early in the play, the narrator, like the God of Genesis, hands off the task of naming to one of his creations:

Voice. [. . .] two company aidmen from the medics belly out over the screaming ground to the bloody, floppy body of --what's his name?
Aidman. Hey, it's Ryan! Mickey Ryan! (93)

Now, however, Mrs. Ryan names herself, an important development toward the characters' autonomy as Mickey moves toward life outside of the military hospital.

The drama's end play's with the notion of manipulating the meaning of physical reality through words. As he tries to coax Mickey to walk up the three stairs on his wooden legs, the Major turns the challenge into a metaphor for the new, psychological battle that will replace Mickey's earlier physical combat:

Major. There aren't any buts! You're still a man. You can live. You can work. You can fight.
Mickey. Fight?
Major. Yes! Do you think you must have a gun? There are ways of fighting for everything you want. Do you want your wife?
Mickey. Yes.
Major. Well, get up and walk to her.

But when Mrs. Ryan suddenly appears at the top of the stairs, Mickey loses heart, taking a more cynical view of the Major's analogy as "Just a big spiel to get me to walk up three steps" (110). In the end, however, Mickey makes the three steps up, with the last sound we hear from him being the sound of his prosthetic foot on the top stair. And Mrs. Ryan's reaction--"Mickey . . . Oh, Mickey!" (110) tells us that he has accepted the challenge of this new struggle. It is a dramatic ending, even when read and not heard in its intended medium.

Radio texts, wireless words, and more

This blog will contain my thoughts on radio drama, literature written for or broadcast on radio, and other intersections between radio and literature. I invite anyone with similar interests on these subjects to add your own comments.