The Plays for Americans Radio Program

From the Time Magazine article of September 4, 1939:

Radio: Genius's Hour

NBC's one-man dramatic workshop is a 30-year-old, hornrimmed, half-pint scrivener named Arch Oboler, who in the last five years has written some 200 radio plays, cast many of them, directed some of them standing on a table so the actors could see him. About Arch Oboler are many unmistakable marks of genius. His inspiration is the music of the masters; amid the correct mufti of staid Radio City he sports Hollywood-style polo shirts, violent jackets, unpressed bags; in his atelier he kept a pet horned toad until last weekend it died after overdoing a diet of worms.

This sort of front, plus a prodigious capacity for turning out ideas and listenable plays, make Arch Oboler NBC's No. 1 Wonder Boy. His start toward such a ranking goes back to a bundle of estimable playlets he turned out in 1934-35 for the Grand Hotel program. This got him an NBC job writing for Rudy Vallee's hour, as well as a Wednesday after-midnight radio dreadful called Lights Out. After two eldritch years, during which Lights Out collected a batch of eerie-minded fan clubs and curdled more next-door neighbors than any program on the air, Arch Oboler left the series in other hands, feeling that not even he could top the high in horror he had by then achieved.

Since March, Arch Oboler has been writing, casting, directing, dabbling with radio tricks and sound effects, in a Saturday night play series specializing in "emotional conflict." To last Saturday's, NBC paid special attention, giving a full hour for the first time, and using the NBC symphony orchestra for the first time in a dramatic show. Reason: sixtyish Alia Nazimova, Stanislavsky-trained, Ibsenite and cinema siren, had been won to radio.

For the occasion, Playwright Oboler had constructed This Lonely Heart, a doloroso radio fluoroscoping of the troubled soul of Tschaikowsky's ever-loving patroness, Mme von Meek (Nazimova).

Grey-bobbed Nazimova took to the microphone like a trouper reclaimed for a Billy Rose floor show, emoted copiously in black slacks in an audience-less studio, wasted wordily away at the finish like a traditional Camille. Mightily pleased with the play, the playwright and a medium which let her hold most of the stage for a full hour without a single program or gum wrapper crackling, Alia Nazimova let out a secret. "Always," she confessed, "I have hated audiences. Always!"

As the War effort rolled on, both CBS and NBC brought their brightest stars to bear on patriotic and inspirational wartime drama. In 1941, NBC contracted with Arch Oboler to write a series of new radioplays with a central theme: "dedicated to people of goodwill, everywhere, who believe in the inherent dignity of Man." To that end, NBC offered Oboler an open-ended, blank slate of programming, to be terminated whenever Oboler had exhausted his own prodigious orginality.

Originally approached about the project by the Hollywood Victory Committee, Oboler agreed to undertake the series for NBC, initially intending to produce eight new original radioplays for the series. As the series unfolded, Oboler continued to rise to the challenge, often responding to topical events that, in at least one instance, occurred during the run of previously broadcast programs. His "U.S. Ugly Duck" was inspired by the March 20, 1942 news article about one of the first Liberty ships to be commissioned under United States emergency wartime building program, and one of the first to have circumnavigated the horn of South Africa to enter the Mediterranean through the Straits of Hormuz--without encountering any U-boat resistance. The arrival of the ship in Alexandria was a cause celebre for the Allies and a triumphant demonstration of U.S. War Mobilization efforts.

The event caught the imagination of Arch Oboler, who, within a month had translated the event into one of the series' most stirring and inspirational radioplays. Oboler continued to write new radioplays until he had written twenty-one of them. The twenty-first--and last--of his original radioplays, "Lieutenant Patience" never aired.

The productions all carried messages of hope, inspiration and triumph over adversity, as was their charter. Indeed, Oboler had already triumphed over Radio with his series of Arch Oboler's Plays, very much in the vein of appealing to the 'everyman' or 'everywoman' of America. In tailoring his writing creativity even narrower for this series of radioplays, Oboler clearly rose to the challenge, not creating some of the era's most stirring and thought-provoking dramas, but attracting America's finest dramatic talent to the productions as well.

Olivia De Havilland led the procession of stars, followed by Raymond Massey, Thomas Mitchell, Lieutenant Jimmy Stewart, Robert Taylor, Ralph Bellamy, Joan Crawford, Claude Rains, and Bette Davis. The series also starred Radio's own Elliott Lewis, Mercedes McCambridge, Dick Powell, Jean Hersholt, and Burgess Meredith, among others.

A triumph by any measure, the handful of circulating exemplars show both Oboler's growing maturity as a writer, as well as further underscoring his genius for writing very personal drama, almost exclusively from the point of view of the protagonist.

Series Derivatives:

Notes on Provenances:

The most helpful provenances were the log of the RadioGOLDINdex and newspaper listings.

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