NEW YORK — Long before the emergence drama podcastslisteners around the world listened only to audio versions of radio plays.
Tom Stoppard And Arthur Miller were among the many playwrights who wrote short plays for radio early in their careers, and such memorable dramas as Harold Pinter's A Little Pain and Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons premiered on radio broadcasts. Working in radio was often a way to earn money and perfect the art of plotting and dialogue.
When Tennessee Williams As a student at the University of Iowa in the late 1930s, still calling himself by his birth name Tom Williams, he completed a rarely heard gothic radio sketch called “Strangers.” Williams' game appears this week on Strand Magazinewhich previously published little-known works Ernest HemingwayWilliam Faulkner and John Steinbeck among others.
“The play contains all the theatrical elements of early radio horror,” writes Strand editor-in-chief Andrew Gully, “a storm, a howling wind, shadows, a house over the sea, flickering candles, mysterious footsteps on a staircase, ghostly creatures, as well as early hints of themes and techniques that Williams would return to in his most famous later work: isolation, fear, shades of gray between imagination and reality, a house haunted by the memories and personal horrors of those who inhabit it.” him.”
Blanche DuBois famously referred to “the kindness of strangers” in Williams' classic film A Streetcar Named Desire. This early work could be called “The Terror of Strangers.” His play is set in a columnar manor in New England on the Atlantic coast, a “ghostly” house squinting under a lighthouse beam that casts a yellowish spell. The title refers to the invisible demons that haunt the two residents of the house, Mr. Brighton and Mrs. Brighton.
“We, the human species, have only five senses. Or, at most, six,” Mr. Brighton states at the very beginning. “Strangers are beings that we could sense if we had seven, eight, or maybe nine senses. But in reality they exist outside our small sphere of contact with reality, and therefore… what we know about them is very, very little.”
According to Williams scholar John Buck, “Strangers” was among the few radio plays the young playwright worked on while in Iowa, where he and his classmates were required to write and produce plays. Buck believes Williams was influenced by commercial considerations and personal forces.
According to Buck, scary stories were popular on radio in the late 1930s. Williams first thought of radio plays as an “exercise”, but over time he began to take them more seriously. While writing The Strangers, he was already plagued by the mental health problems of his sister Rose, who later inspired the fragile Laura Wingfield to create The Glass Menagerie. According to Buck, Williams would explore at length the idea of madness and how we react to people who seem to see things “no one else can see.”
