Prestige Programs

Last week listeners on NBC's Red network heard a radio drama whose acts were divided, not with the usual fading and swelling of music, but with a rumbling sound as of an oldtime curtain going up & down. The play was The Minute Men of 1774-5, by James A. Herne, 19th Century playwright, father of Actresses Julie and Chrystal Herne. NBC's actors carefully did not burlesque this story of Minute Man Reuben Foxglove's beauteous ward, Dorothy, who turned out to be the long-lost daughter of a British noble, and for whose affections a British officer and an Indian chief vied. The Minute Men of 1774-5, was first of a series of nine America's Lost Plays which NBC is putting on (Thursdays, 9 p. m. E. D. S. T.) as "prestige programs" this summer, at a cost of from $1,000 to $2,000 a week.

In the lamplit and gaslit days of the U. S. theatre, few plays were published. Four years ago Barrett Harper Clark, historian and critic (Eugene O'Neill, A Study of the Modern Drama) of the drama, got an $8,000 grant (through Authors' League of America and the Dramatists' Guild) from the Rockefeller Foundation, began hunting for unpublished plays, of which he believes there are 20,000. In old actors' homes, in garrets of theatre folk, after devious detectification, Mr. Clark and his helpers found some 400 plays. As prime examples of Americana--but not of dramatic literature--Princeton University Press hopes to publish 100 of them in 20 volumes this autumn, at $75 a set. No one was more surprised than serious, bespectacled Mr. Clark when NBC asked him to supervise production of nine Lost Plays, and comment on them during performance. Historian Clark hates the radio, says he did not know who Kate Smith was when his children lately asked him.

Biggest disappointment Mr. Clark experienced was his discovery that The Phoenix (1875) was not really lost; it was printed in one small edition in 1900. This play he thinks was the first to use the line, "And the villain still pursued her." Most painstaking search was for the script of Metamora: or, The Last of the Wampanoags, first actable U. S. drama about American Indians, and a favorite of Edwin Forrest. This week the Lost Plays series presents Flying Scud, one of six lost dramas by Dion Boucicault. Its claim to fame: the line "I've got to see a man about a dog."

Last week CBS's best "prestige program," Columbia Workshop, celebrated its third birthday on the air by inaugurating a Festival (Thursdays, 10 p. m. E. D. S. T.) of 13 broadcasts. Eight are the pick of the 140 radio plays the Workshop has done since its beginning. Five are new ones, among them plays by Dorothy Parker, Lord Dunsany, William Saroyan.

Original director of the Workshop was Irving Reis, a swarthy, jittery onetime control-room engineer who thought the production, not the play, was the thing, and who sweated with oscillators, electrical filters, echo chambers to produce some of the most exciting sounds ever put on the air--Gulliver's voice, the witches in Macbeth, footsteps of gods, the sound of fog, a nuts-driving dissonance of bells, the feeling of going under ether. When Director Reis left the Workshop--which also graduated an even more celebrated member, Orson Welles--it was run for a time by handsome, long-armed William N. Robson, CBS staff director, who used such sound-effects as knifing a watermelon to sound like a stabbing. Later the Workshop became a laboratory for all of Columbia's crack directors. Reis, now a writer-director for Paramount in Hollywood, will direct three of the plays in the Festival; Robson, one. Most famed of the Workshop's plays. Archibald MacLeish's The Fall of the City, goes on the air September 28. Other good bets: an adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benet's John Brown's Body (July 20), and a bombing fantasy, They Fly Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease (September 7), both by Norman Corwin.

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