TALK
RADIO
WRITTEN BY
ERIC BOGOSIAN
CREATED BY
ERIC BOGOSIAN
AND TAD SAVINAR
THEATRE COMMUNICATIONS GROUPNEW YORK2007
Talk Radio is copyright © 2007 by Ararat Productions, Inc.
Talk Radio is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 520 Eighth Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10018-4156.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bogosian, Eric.
Talk radio / written by Eric Bogosian ; created by Eric Bogosian and Tad Savinar.
p. cm.
eISBN 978-1-55936-745-5
1. Radio talk shows—Drama. I. Savinar, Tad. II. Title.
PS3552.O46T35 2007
812’.54—dc22
2007016250
Text design and composition by Lisa Govan
Cover design by Kitty Suen
Cover photo of Liev Schreiber from the 2007 Broadway production
of Talk Radio is by Joan Marcus
Author photo by Susan Johann
First Edition, June 2007
This edition is dedicated
to the memory of
Joseph Papp
Content
PREFACE
I wrote this play during a chaotic time in my life. I was newly married, finally getting attention for my work, an agent had signed me, I was even starting to make a living. Coincidentally, my life was falling apart. I was bogged down in a “lifestyle” that had served me well since my arrival in New York City ten years earlier, but which now left me with daily hangovers and a sour attitude. Something had to give, but I wasn’t sure what. I was hungry for an indefinable something. Fame? Fortune? Peace of mind? “Confusion reigned.”
This play emerged from these times. It began as a collaboration between Tad Savinar, a visual artist living in Portland, Oregon, and myself. In early 1985, in Portland, Tad and I staged a performance combining projections and live callers. I played Barry Champlain.
A year later, Joseph Papp asked me if there was anything I wanted to do at The Public Theater. I took the thirty pages I had of Barry and the callers and rewrote Talk Radio as a play, surrounding Barry with a storyline and fellow radio-station personnel. The play, Talk Radio, directed by Fred Zollo, arrived without much fanfare in the spring of 1987. For four months I reprised the title character, Barry Champlain, alongside a wonderful cast. In midsummer I left the show and Larry Pine played Barry for two more months. There was some talk of taking the play to Broadway, but Broadway was not the right venue for the play back then.
Barry evolved from earlier characters I had played either in nightclubs or in my solo shows. In many ways, he is my alter ego. He is energetic and dark. He is hopefully funny. He is insecure. He is a bully. And more than anything else, he has the soul of a performer, which is to say, his audience means everything to him.
Around that same time, producer Ed Pressman bought the rights to make a film of the play. Once we got started on the film, I asked Ed to secure the rights to the Stephen Singular book, Talked to Death, a biography about the life and death of Alan Berg, a popular shock-jock who was murdered in cold blood in Denver in 1984. Berg was gunned down by right-wing extremists for his upfront and incendiary views. As I wrote the script for the film, I wove in aspects of Berg’s life and death. Oliver Stone came aboard to direct. We continued to finesse the screenplay, then jumped into an accelerated shooting schedule. (Stone was in pre-production on Born on the Fourth of July.) The film was released in late 1988, about eighteen months after the play first opened in New York.
When Oliver and I worked on the film adaptation, we had to transpose the rhythm of the play, which allowed for long, leisurely dialogue with the callers, into the rhythm of a movie, which needed a more insistent plot. With Oliver’s film it became even more important that each call build the dramatic tension of the story. Plays can enjoy taking time with charismatic moments—movies cannot. Movies are like sharks—when they stop moving they die. And so some callers were deleted, others were added. Action, flashbacks, other locales were added to the story. Every line was polished.
But the skeleton of the story remained intact, the story of a man who has invented himself by entertaining his audience. A man who knows his worth by the size of his ratings. And this is a man who must finally face what he is, whether he likes it or not. Although we added a violent ending to the film, this story is the same story I presented at The Public Theater’s Martinson Hall in the summer of 1987, before Oliver Stone and before Alan Berg. (The violent ending seemed right for our movie. It gave the film a cinematic as well as thematic closure.)
In 2006, nearly twenty years later, the producer Jeffrey Richards thought bringing the play to Broadway might make sense. In the last few years, an abundance of dramatic plays have been giving new life to Broadway, and Broadway now has a younger and broader audience. It felt like the right time to bring Talk Radio to this new audience. I looked at the polishing that had been done with the film. Director Robert Falls and I looked at the more dynamic plotting of the film. Although the play is the same play as that play presented twenty years ago, I used what I learned from the first version and the film to groom and adrenalinize the play. It looks the same, but it’s different—that’s the play you find here.
It’s also important to note that putting the play up again required a very specific talent. It is after all a play with a very dominant central character. The role of Barry Champlain is technically very difficult, and the actor must have total command of both comic and dramatic chops. Finally, there has to be some sense that this guy has the vocal equipment and charisma to be a talk-radio host. The audience must feel as if they would listen to this show on their radio in their home.
I suggested one actor. And that actor, Liev Schreiber, agreed to do the role. Liev has been very generous in rethinking the play.
In