Metadrama in Old Time Radio: “Abbott…What Page Are You On?”

Abstract

Introduction In Radio Voices, Michele Hilmes identifies the of radio theater as social and cultural force that dominated waking hours and public consciousness from 1922 until its apotheosis in television in the early 1950s (xiv, xv). During these years of economic crisis and war, radio's primary cultural role was to entertain, provide hope, and reconfirm America's traditional values. Radio also played the secondary role of introducing a postmodern sensibility to mainstream America, a role that has gone unstudied while numerous scholarly works have discussed the postmodern in stage productions of the time - Brecht, Pirandello, Beckett, Chekhov, Strindberg, Shakespeare revivals, and even Gilbert and Sullivan. However, several popular radio programs made their own fictionality a major part of the storytelling, employing postmodern techniques like metadrama, plurality of style, intertextuality, role-switching, a play within the play, and the celebration of chance and playfulness. Radio during its golden age influenced nearly every household, reaching as many as 82% of Americans in 1947, according to a C. E. Hooper survey, precursor to television's Nielsen ratings (Rodriguez). Radio achieved great popular appeal, in part, because its fictional characters entered the listener's world and became part of the family. Unlike stage productions and films, which required people to leave their homes and experience the performance in an unfamiliar place with a group of strangers, radio plays were performed right in the authences' living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms. Radio was integrated into ordinary daily life: housewives listened to The Life of Mary Southern and The Romance of Helen Trent as they did housework; children listened to Little Orphan Annie and The Lone Ranger as they did their homework; white collar and blue collar alike listened to Jack Benny and The Lux Radio Theater as they read the evening newspaper or drifted off to sleep. A prime example of the intimacy radio created was FDR's Fireside Chats, a series of thirty radio addresses between 1933 and 1944 that comforted and informed the public. The president's conversational manner and the nature of radio broadcasting gave listeners the impression that he was speaking directly to each of them, a characteristic honored by poet Carl Lamson Carmer two days after Roosevelt's death: [...] I never saw him - But I knew him. Can you have forgotten How, with his voice, he came into our house, The President of the United States, Calling us friends. (Johnson i95) Listeners similarly befriended radio's fictional characters. Through the combination of the writers' creativity, the actors' voices, and each listener's imagination the scripts sprang to life, making the characters, those disembodied but engaging voices, the listener's friends. Radio of that era thrived on postmodern playfulness, often blurring the boundary between the listener's world and the characters' world through the acknowledgement of being engaged in makebelieve, dialogues that entangled characters and listeners in a maze of language, self-conscious play with sounds, and celebration of nonsense. Radio comedies, in particular, followed Brecht's notion of sporting which, according to Margaret Eddershaw, acknowledges the authence as a participant, an educated participant, in the event. More than that, the spectator's presence is carefully exploited in that the actors in a Brecht performance frequently address the authence directly: and so they become implicated. In naturalistic theater, of course, the actor pretends the authence is not there, and spectators become privileged voyeurs who peep through the 'fourth wall' at the selfsustaining 'life' on stage. (22; her emphasis) Unlike naturalistic theater and film (and later television), which encouraged the authence to lose itself in the narrative, radio theater demanded active participation in story-making: listeners had to use their imaginations to help construct, maintain, and inhabit each radio program's fictional world. …