The Electric Theater Radio Program

Radio In Review

 By JOHN CROSBY

 Soporifics With Helen Hayes

      ELECTRIC THEATER, on CBS at 6 p.m. Sundays, has two strikes against it.
     The two strikes, respectively, are Walter Winchell on ABC at the same time and some awfully potent television competition.  Still, it's doing fairly well--not because of any great merit or its dramas but because of the presence of Helen Hayes.
     Miss Hayes is one of the first ladies of the theater--I have more sense than to nominate any one actress as the first--and she also has toured extensively, sometimes penetrating into remote vastnesses of America where even radio is barely known.  Her theater audience isn't confined to Manhattan.
     Also, she's one of the few stage luminaries who is really experienced in radio acting.  In one respect she's unique.  She plays a wide assortment of roles on this program and, in each case, she succeeds in being the character as written and also quite distinctly Helen Hayes.

      PURISTS MAY complain that this is a bad precedent for an actress of Miss Hayes' stature, that she ought to be exclusively character and leave Miss Hayes home with Charles MacArthur.  But the purists probably haven't listened to Electric Theater.     Many of the characters Miss Hayes is asked to play are of such low wattage that it takes a booster charge to galvanize them into some resemblance of people.
       At various times, Miss Hayes has portrayed a colored mammy in the deep South, a naive but determined school teacher, the London suburban housewife of Noel Coward's "Brief Encounter", and a woman of Growing Awareness if you know what I mean and if you don't I'll explain.

      A WOMAN of Growing Awareness is one who is charmed by a strange man in a subway station (he retrieves her purse) or a saloon where she goes to telephone (he rescues her from a drunk) or a midtown street corner (he gives her directions) and then marries him a week later after a whirlwind courtship mostly conducted on the roller coaster at Coney Island.
     Gradually she Grows Aware.  There is something awfully fishy about her husband.  He spends all his time in the cellar, digging.  He disappears for weeks at a time, visiting his mother, he says.  When he returns, he carries a lean box bearing the works hydrochloric acid, in which, he explains, are his dirty shirts which he plans to wash personally in the cellar.
     After 20 minutes if this is radio, at the end of the second act if it's a play, Page 212 if it's a book, she says:  "Why are you staring at me that way?"

      THAT IS A WOMAN of Growing Awareness.  So widespread is this role it's become almost a separate branch of the acting profession.  It ought to have its own union.
     Miss Hayes, I should say, Grew Aware as artfully as the job can be done.  Her Awareness was as gradual and inevitable as an eclipse of the moon.
     Most of her dramas are brimming with romance and many of them have cute endings--much too cute for my taste.  They're not bad, but they're not for me.  I had them tentatively labeled as women's fare, but my wife indignantly has rejected that suggestion.  She finds them inedible, too.
     So lets just call them soporifics, candy coated and non-habit forming.

(copyright 1949, New York Tribune)

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