Roger Gregg speaks to Norman Corwin on Radio Theatre

Hailed as radio’s ‘poet laureate’, NORMAN CORWIN is considered by many to be the America’s foremost writer in the medium. Born in Boston in 1910, Corwin began his radio career as a local commentator.

He moved to New York City in 1938 and produced Norman Corwin’s Words Without Music for CBS Radio. Two of Corwin’s greatest works; “The Plot to Overthrow Christmas” and “They Fly Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease”, debuted on this series.

ROGER GREGG is the director of Crazy Dog Audio Theatre Company, an Award winning professional radio theatre troupe based in Dublin, Ireland which creates original radio comedies for RTÉ, the national broadcasting company of Ireland. See www.crazydogaudiotheatre.com

GREGG: What are the unique strengths of radio theatre?

CORWIN: First, radio is a stage with a bare set. This is not a deprivation, but an advantage, for a bare proscenium should be as inviting to a radio playwright or director as a bare wall is to a muralist, as a silent organ was to Bach. Not to be grand about it, but the features and dimensions of a place, of a room, of a landscape, are not, in a good radio script, described in so many words. They are perceived by characters and brought out by speech, sound, by allusion. Obliquely. Examples: "Don't you ever let any light into this room?" ----"Where did you get that painting, the one under the crossed swords?" ----"Don't sit in that chair---it's an antique, and rickety." "Stop. Whoa. I've got to rest. This damn heat would smelt steel"---and so forth. Obviously this sort of indication enables the listener to collaborator with the writer and director.

GREGG: We hear the expression "boob tube" describing American television.

CORWIN: And "couch potato" to describe addicted viewers. ---That's because everything is spelled out for the TV viewer, whereas in radio the word has authority as well as utility. The listener becomes at once set design wardrobe chief, even casting director. I believe that if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be drawn to radio as a medium that addresses the ear exclusively, because after all the ear is the poet of the senses. Through it we hear music, the ultimate abstraction of sound. Let's not forget that originally language was sound only. It's only latterly that words began to be written.

GREGG: So given this greater degree of collaboration with the audience, this unique degree of collaboration, how does this create special opportunities and challenges or pitfalls in Radio Theatre for the writer, and the performer?

CORWIN: When a writer addresses a microphone, he's not speaking to a few people but potentially to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. That to me is a special challenge. The pitfalls are of course the shortcomings of the artists. Every medium has its pitfalls. I imagine in primitive times there were good and bad singers and village poets who had varying range. I don’t think there are formidable pitfalls for radio that do not exist in other media. For every medium of communication, certainly the quiet mediums where one isn’t performing in public but writing on a blank piece of paper or on a computer, there are certain disciplines, certain great degrees of quality and differences in approach.

GREGG: ‘It all starts with the writing’ is an often repeated theatrical adage. I’ve heard it many times usually in connection with a production that just doesn’t work. What exactly does ‘It all starts with the writing’ mean?

CORWIN: I think it means that the production, whether you talk about a movie, a play or radio programme, begins with the script. A river never rises higher than its source. I think that the phrase ‘it all begins with the writing’ applies particularly, and has been used in my experience, mostly to describe movies or television productions where the greatest direction, where a wonderful score, cannot alone create a successful performance. There can be for example in any assembly line medium, such as movies and television especially, to a lesser degree radio, where there are many diverse elements contributing to the whole, in film of course there would be the set, the actor, the lighting, the photography, the design and the production elements, but if the script is weak, a picture is hard put to overcome. As I say this, I realise that there are painful exceptions. I’ve seen movies that were crammed with special effects; lots of violence, explosions, objects flying and whirling, and great physical acrobatics, and they have succeeded because they have an audience that is enchanted and electrified by special effects. That’s the exception. But the rule in writing, in the performing media, is that it starts with the writing.

GREGG: Another adage often heard is ‘a good story well told’. What does ‘a good story well told’ mean in terms of radio? Is there such a thing as a story that makes you say ‘That should be on radio!’?

CORWIN: I think that a good story well told is very important to any medium, but especially to radio, television and film, because one is at the mercy of a fingertip, of a remote control. He can whisk away to another channel or to another wavelength.

Whereas when you go to a concert or go to a theatre stage play, or to a movie, you’ve paid for your seat. It’s a little embarrassing to your neighbours to get up and leave, because you’re blocking his or her view. There is a certain etiquette for a live audience watching something. Whereas the radio listener and the television viewer is able to shift his station. In Los Angeles, from which I’m speaking, there are something like 60 or 70 different TV channels. A viewer can skip from station to station; it is what is called ‘surfing’. Therefore it behoves the writer, the producer, the performer to be as gifted and as competent and as skilled in telling a story well as is possible.

GREGG: And that leads into my next point. You have this pressure to hook people and keep their interest because, as you say, at the flick of a button they’re gone if they’re bored, if for a second or two they disengage, so that puts tremendous pressure on every element of the production to hook the listener’s interest and keep it.

CORWIN: Right.

GREGG: How is that done? How do you hook interest and how do you keep it?

CORWIN: Well, in radio, the task of hooking the audience is more difficult that it is in a visual medium because the eye is satisfied with movement. For example, one of the shortcomings of American commercial television, is that the producers, the advertisers, have very little trust in the attention span of their audience. And most commercials are made up of images that last no longer than a second or two. It’s cut cut cut cut cut. Radio is above that. Radio relies on that which would hold the interest of a blind person. Because radio has a blind audience. They see nothing. They hear. So the well-told story is one that continually involves and interests or informs, the listener, that which is instructive or which has a kind of emotion that arrests the listener, moves the listener. Everything that is conveyed in radio, must be conveyed by words, sounds or music. It has no help whatever from the eye. And this is something that the radio performer, the radio writer, director and actor, grows into, becomes accustomed to it. It’s like a skater learning to skate very fast, to dance, to do exercises on one foot comparable to toe dancing. One learns a discipline and becomes familiar with it and employs it.

GREGG: Speaking of learning the discipline, are there secrets or formulas or tricks for catching and holding the listener?

To me there’s something symbolic about that. The first expression of a human being out of the womb is sound. We know that that infant is well and normal and healthy, if it cries. And it’s nothing I’ve really contemplated in the past, but it becomes apparent to me that the first, you know the growth of language is such a marvellous phenomenon. Before there was any vocabulary, there were grunts. There were indications. And even today, much expression comes in a simple sigh, in a sob, in laughter. In tone of voice. Character is expressed not only by the words but in how they are spoken. All of these elements are vital to radio. And I don’t mean to vaunt radio as a superior medium, because there are archipelagos and mainlands of excellence in television.

GREGG: You speak about eloquence, the greatest potential for eloquence is through sound, through language, but the world is changing. If you go up and down the radio band in the United States, you’re not going to find what you could have found in 1948. People are not talking the same way. They are not using language the same way. The attention span is contracting. It seems to me that regarding language in America, the great orators who founded the Republic are gone. We have evolved from Washington or Jefferson sitting beside the Potomac reading Voltaire in the original, to Eisenhower who read a different Cowboy Western each week, to a President today who, well, does he read anything? Can he read? Or write? The culture is moving away from eloquence in language and I’d like to know is there any hope? Can radio theatre capture and hold audiences in today’s sound-bite MTV generation?

GREGG: But Jefferson, for example was extremely well read.

GREGG: Yes. One has only to read the George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Jonathan Swift, James Joyce. Ireland is particularly proud of its writers. Before we went to the Euro currency, the figures that were on our paper money were several famous Irish writers.

CORWIN: Really?

GREGG: Yes. Well, Ireland’s never conquered Europe or whatever to put a famous General on the 50-pound note.

CORWIN: Yes.

GREGG: But the ‘conquering’ it has done, has been through it’s writing. And even it’s living writers are very much honoured.

CORWIN: Well that’s a mature society.

GREGG: So to get back to radio, and the sound-bite, dumbed down audience used to such a diet, in this environment can radio theatre even compete? And if so how?

CORWIN: Well you know ‘never’ is a long, long time. I hesitate to say that radio will never recover the presence and the strengths and charms that it once exercised. That would depend a great deal on other elements of society. Upon education, upon attitudes, upon its stance in the world. Upon fundamental, broad values of a society. I see hopeful signs.

There are seasons. Even in the aspect of particular writers, they are sometimes recognised in their lifetime and then they sink into a kind of obsolescence and some are revived. It happened in America with Mark Twain, there was a little dip in his appreciation and he’s come roaring back. It happens to writers like Hemingway. And who knows? This is a long and I’m afraid rambling answer to your question about the possibility of there being a recrudescence or revival of radio.

GREGG: There are much wider factors involved. You can write a radio play. You can record it. You can put it on CD, but then comes the question of how do you get it on the air coast to coast? How can you get it in front of an audience? Or how can you get the CDs into the shops across the States? And how can you get the word out? Otherwise it’s like a book that is only published in 4 copies. It disappears.

CORWIN: Exactly.

GREGG: These are bigger questions involving skills that perhaps an Artist, probably doesn’t have, and maybe shouldn’t have. These are business skills.

CORWIN: Yes. That’s right.

GREGG: Can I ask you about the digital technologies that have come in?

CORWIN: I have mixed feelings about it because when I began in radio in the late 30’s through the 40’s, all performances in radio were live. Now of course we have the option of using tape and other new technologies. Sound quality has greatly improved. And it’s as in music where suddenly along comes a new instrument. In Bach’s day, there were harpsichords and there was not the piano that we know today. And there were other instruments, there are candidates for inclusion to be taken seriously like the theremin. You’re probably too young to remember the theremin.

GREGG: We used a theremin in our last radio series.

CORWIN: Did you?

GREGG: Yes.

CORWIN: [laughs] The saxophone which was a latecomer. Yet genius is not picky. There have been great works composed for the guitar. Even mandolin concertos in Vivaldi’s day. A small trio of Schubert can be as fulfilling, rewarding and ennobling as a massive orchestra doing a Mahler symphony. So the tools are always of great interest and attraction to the writer, the composer, to the photographer. But ultimately it comes down to the artist. Art is going to out live us all. The ancient epigrams about Art are valid. Life is short, Art is long.

GREGG: Arch Oboler once said ‘I don’t write about sound effects, I write about people’ Talking about what was the secret of ‘scariness’

GREGG: I read somewhere where you once said ‘Background music never need be banal. When it is used in support of drama, it can greatly enhance without harming itself.’ What role should music have in audio drama?

GREGG: It has often been noted that many big name screen and stage actors just can’t ‘do radio’. What are the special skills needed for good radio acting? What do you need when you get up in front of a microphone?

CORWIN: You need to have been equipped with a good ear. That you can use what you have heard in the way of speaking. The listener can spot whether you are feigning, whether you are genuine, in your accent, in your approach, in your station in life. Because a street cleaner would have a different vocabulary and a different approach to anything he says than a Professor of the Humanities. The reason why stage actors and movie actors who have not had experience in radio feel sometimes ill at ease or not quite at home, in radio, is that they do not have any help from that camera. Their profile is of no use to them. The starlet’s make up is of no use to her. Everything has to be conveyed by language, by the tone of voice. Actors who’ve never had any radio, who are brought up in the theatre, find themselves faced with different controls. The stage actor has to project to be heard in Row W.

If he used a voice like that in a scene on radio he would knock the station off the air. It’s a matter of acclimation. I had the good fortune of being able to work with some of the best actors in other media, such as Charles Laughton and Orson Welles who had no trouble with microphones.

GREGG: And Jimmy Stewart. He was brilliant.

CORWIN: Jimmy Stewart, yes. He was wonderful!

GREGG: When you listen to him, you feel that he’s six inches away and that he’s talking directly to you.

CORWIN: Right!

GREGG: Jimmy Stewart was very intimate that way with the microphone. Good microphone technique

CORWIN: Exactly. A good example.

GREGG: The last group of questions I have are about practical tips and general points for the writer, the actor, the producer, and the director.

CORWIN: Well, I have strong feelings about comprehensibility. I do not share the obscurantist’s view of our language. I find that clarity and being able to convey meaning, emotion, attitude, through understandable language is a sine qua non of radio.

GREGG: What is this ‘Obscurantist’ position ?

There are even of course in great literature, pages and pages of very difficult and obscure language, where the writer is apparently the only one who knows what the meaning is. And I think that it is necessary to be clear. Shakespeare was at fault according to serious critics of his time and later. There are moments in Shakespeare where he is too obscure. I find that comprehensibility is a must. Listening to a programme should not be working on a crossword puzzle!

GREGG: I find that you can set that as a rule, but every so often something comes along and for some reason it shouldn’t work, but it does.

CORWIN: Yes.

GREGG: For example, I have this old recording from the 50’s of the Irish actor Cyril Cusak.

CORWIN: Oh yes.

GREGG: Cusak reads the Shem the Penman chapter from Joyce’s FINNEGAN’S WAKE, which is about as obscurantist as you can get.

CORWIN: That’s right.

GREGG: Now I’ve ploughed through several hundred pages of that book

CORWIN: You’re a brave man! [laughs]

GREGG: It’s heavy going. Anthony Burgess has an annointated-abridged edition out and even that is nearly 400 pages long. But when you listen to Cyril Cusak reading it out loud, in the proper Dublin accent, it just flows musically along. When you don’t have to tangle with the effort of deciphering, when it’s done for you, it’s compelling.

CORWIN: You use the right words ‘flows musically’. When I was a kid, I was attracted to books. My family was not affluent enough to have many at home and when I discovered the library I was thrilled. I remember borrowing a book of John Keats. And I turned to 'Endymion' which is a long poem, I didn’t know what he was writing about, but the words were beautiful. And my first feelings about love for poetry, came from its musical quality. I’m not saying that everything should be written on the level of a primer. But there are certain idioms, a certain vocabulary that is deliberately obscure.

Let me give you an example. I read a book review not long ago in which the word ‘tralatition’ was used. And I never heard the word. I looked it up in my unabridged dictionary, it wasn’t there. I looked it up in a second unabridged dictionary and it wasn’t there. I looked it up in a modern dictionary, it wasn’t there and I turned to a little book on my reference shelf titled ‘A Dictionary of Preposterous and Obsolete Words’. Preposterous is actually in the title. And there it was. ‘Tralatition’ means metaphoric. Well why didn’t this critic use the word ‘metaphor’? He loved it so much that he used it both as a noun and an adjective. ‘Tralatition’ and ‘tralatitious’. And any word that begins with ‘Tra-la’ is in trouble to begin with. So there are writers who do gymnastics because they want the reader to be puzzled.

GREGG: But sometimes puzzling works. For example you could have a certain part in a drama where things are supposed to break down, the whole building is supposed to collapse or whatever, and so you have say a mad sequence of noise or free-form jazz, cacophonic music. And that works to achieve its effect of confusion in say 12 seconds. The desired effect is confusing the listener, but if it went on for 2 and a half minutes of cacophony, you have turned off the listener. There is a right balance. You puzzle them just enough and then make it clear or move on to the next thing.

CORWIN: You stated it very, very well. I have no quarrel with the candid, the frank, out-and-out Surrealists. I admire them. Surrealism can be powerful or it can be very amusing. I don’t regard that as incomprehensible, because after all we dream surrealistically every night. But what I do quarrel with is anything that is whimsy-whamsy, or that is deliberately academic or scholarly and stiff about it. And ‘Tralatition’ and ‘tralatitious’ are examples of what I mean. Who needs it?!

GREGG: No one. Perhaps in a peculiar way this is pointing out a strength of commercialism. Since in the ‘heyday’ of radio, programme makers knew that if you weren’t entertaining the listener and keeping them involved, by being clear, by doing all the things necessary to keep that attention, the listener would change the channel. Whereas now, today, perhaps people making these things aren’t working professionally in a competitive medium where the premium is constantly on maintaining interest and entertaining. Perhaps they do these things as a personal thing and so are not subject to the pressure of saying ‘Ok, let’s edit because it’s got to be over in 26 minutes’

CORWIN: Exactly. Sure. You know one of the elements of radio writing that I experimented with and had good results, was flaunting the impression that the attention span and the intelligence of the listening public, is rather low. The conviction was that the average age of the listener would be 14 to 16 and I never believed that. In fact some of the letters that I got in response to some of my better programmes were better written that the programmes they were writing in about! There can be a great many intelligent listeners and they number in the millions. There was a kind of tradition even when radio was as young as when I got into it and it still was building a tradition, that one could not safely extend a scene or a speech of just language, for longer than a minute. But I sometimes found myself in situations when a character, a narrator would go on for 3 minutes. And I didn’t write it at that length in order to experiment or show that I could sustain the listener’s interest, I wrote it because the drama or the thought or the ideation, required it. And it succeeded. I was never counted out because of that.

There were other things you know where I experimented and they failed. But I was demonstrating to myself, not purposely, but it turned out that way, that what you are saying, the words that you are using, the ideas that you are expressing, the thought, can hold. I think its true of any lasting, impressionable writing. Nobody would want Pericles to cut his famous oration because it was too long. I remember a radio producer once complaining that the Lord’s Prayer spoken in a drama, was a little too long [laughs] and needed to be trimmed. What I’m saying is that in the beginning is the word, in the middle is the word and at the end is the word. That words are like notes of music, they can be compelling, they can be sad, they can be glad, they can perform acrobatics.

GREGG: Any final comments?

CORWIN: Yes, how I envy a radio system that will encourage this kind of conversation. And I hope that it is representative of the radio that is abroad in Ireland.

GREGG: Well we have RTÉ, Radio Telefis Eireann, which is the national broadcasting company of Ireland. It is set up on a model similar to the BBC except that RTÉ also carries commercial advertising. Our company works a great deal with RTÉ Radio 1 which is the heavier, more serious channel of RTÉ radio. They have a pop station [ 2 FM ] as well and a classical music station [Lyric FM ] and an Irish language station [Raidió na Gaeltachta ]. RTÉ Radio 1 is where the well-researched, in depth daily news goes out, there’s informative talk programmes, a daily Arts show reviewing films, current plays, exhibitions, recently released books and interviews with persons working in the Arts. And also the Radio Drama goes out on RTÉ Radio 1, and they also have a weekly radio comedy slot and of course radio documentaries.

CORWIN: And you are doing original radio drama?

GREGG: Yes. Our company, Crazy Dog, has been commissioned by RTÉ over the last several years to produce radio comedy-theatre. This summer we’ve gotten our own evening, 40 minute slot. We’ll be doing 6 adventure comedies.

CORWIN: Are we going to be able to hear any of them over here?

GREGG: I’ll certainly send you copies.

CORWIN: But I mean it should be broadcast here.

GREGG: Well we keep banging on the doors.

CORWIN: I envy what you are doing. For my kind of radio, it is moribund here in the States. The last few programmes I did were underwritten by the Corporation of Public

Broadcasting and they were heard over NPR. But it’s nothing like the old days when you had 500 stations broadcasting simultaneously across the country. Now that same network has 7 owned and operated stations, all because television is more profitable minute by minute.

GREGG: It’s really a shame because America is quite a rich country so they say. And if countries like Britain or Ireland can have a national broadcaster that can make space for serious radio, radio documentaries and radio theatre. It’s a shame that America just let it all slip away or so much of it.

GREGG: Thank you so much Mr. Corwin, speaking with you has been quite a thrill.

CORWIN: Well, it’s wonderful that we can talk this way across damn near half the globe.