Talk Radio

By Eric Bogosian. Presented by New Haven Theater Company through Sept. 17 at Ultra Radio, 242 College Street, New Haven. Directed by Hallie Martenson. Performed by Peter Chenot (Barry Champlain), Erich Greene (Stu Noonan), Hilary Brown (Linda MacArthur), Steve Scarpa (Jack Woodruff), Jack Rogers (Kent), Marty Tucker (Sid Greenberg/Callers), Jenny Schuck (Dr. Susan Fleming/Callers) and Dave Sheehan (Bernie/Callers).

Sitting around watching the radio? It happens. The Museum of Broadcasting in New York used to have a series where you’d sit in an auditorium while classic radio shows of yesteryear, were piped through the antique radio in the middle of the period living room set-up onstage.

The way New Haven Theater Company is presenting Eric Bogosian’s sensitively scabrous 1987 play Talk Radio, audience of less than 20 sits in the actual Ultraradio studios on college street, watching Peter Chenot portray antagonistic radio talk host Barry Champlain through what is largely structured as a real-time broadcast. The crowd watches the show itself plus the staff’s chatter during the commercial breaks, sees Champlain and his engineer bantering and bickering in the booth. Eyes can wander to some administrators huddling in an adjacent office to the left, where the suits take notes on Champlain’s style. To the right, there’ s a window looking out at college street, where the real-life passersby add a whole other visual element to the radio mix.

The hustle bustle of close-quartered, suffocating everyday life, the volatile interactions of ordinary people, is what Bogosian’ s play’s about. The microphone and studio give special power, and provide a special attraction, to those  whose voices might otherwise not be heard (or, in this case, seen). Watching those amplified emotions play out on College Street, where a secondary audience of window gazers can form to watch Champlain’s antics, adds a new spectrum (a broader frequency?) to the site-specific staging.

A play about the potential dangers of unfettered access to a media soapbox might seem like a pretty tired subject. But Eric Bogosian never has held back as a writer, delighting in pushing the vulgarity and viscerality buttons. What might have come off as hyperbolic satire 15 years ago still registers as credible drama today.

Around the time the play first happened, a real talk show host got murdered, which affected Oliver stone’s film version to the point of changing the whole pieces ended to something simultaneously current-events-conscious and dramatically contrived. In subsequent years we’ve had the rise of Rush Limbaugh, reality TV, talk show guests killing each other, the decline of print media and Jerry Springer inspiring an opera. In that context, Talk Radio comes off as a rather modest piece, both in scale and in subject matter. Some out-of-nowhere strange-interlude monologues from the supporting players give Talk Radio the heft of a backstory for its hard-talking hero, the voices forming a Greek chorus that adds pathos and dramatic unity to the enterprise. Even with those grandiose classical enchantments, and a plot which suddenly hit me as a variation on Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Talk Radio remains human-sized, a night in the life of “Night Talk with Barry Champlain.”

In its time, however, this play was the largest-cast show Bogosian had written, his biggest shot at a mainstream New York hit (both as actor and playwright) and a torn-from-the-headlines work facing down what was then a new phenomenon of all-talk radio stations and networks. The producer of the radio show within the show (Steve Scarpa, wisely not overplaying the smarm which emanates naturally from the character) claims to have personally invented the 24-hour talk format; that’s how fresh it was in those days.

Now, of course, the play’s theme of intolerance as entertainment its entirely applicable to the internet. The dangerous microphone is in everybody’s hands today, and the perils dramatized in talk radio are being replayed constantly on our own keyboards.

Smart then, for New Haven Theater Company to play Talk Radio as a 1987 period piece, with now-antiquated reel-to-reel machines and cart tapes strewn about the Ultra Radio counters. (One quibble: The Pixies’ “Debaser,” used as background music, wasn’t released until 1989 and didn’t crack hardly any mainstream radio playlists even then.) Even smarter for director Hallie Martenson to have dialed down the outrageous fuming of the show in favor of comedy and even-tempered reflection. (NHTC did similar lightening-up with Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross a couple of seasons ago.)

The production is even handed, almost mild mannered, not the exercise in frenetic fierceness the original new York production was. While Chenot as Champlain and his radio station compadres go about their business with relative calm, the corps of phone-in callers (Megan Chenot, Marty Tucker, Jenny Schuck) opt for exaggerated comic voices whose closest radio equivalent would be the cultural stereotypes Fred Allen used to interview on hits old Allen’s Alley routines.

When one of the callers, the clueless stoner Kent (Jack Rogers), finally shows up in the studio, he looks exactly like a Mark McKinney stoner character from Kids in the Hall (a series which began airing in 1988!), replete with ridiculous mullet and gaping mouth. This extreme is balanced by the more naturalistic approach taken by the main characters, who keep the busy acting to a minimum—they just sit around, doing their jobs and shutting up while Barry’s on the air. Chenot, who played Picasso in the previous NHTC production, of Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile, has a low-key charisma that allows him to carry the show without histrionic overkill. In such a confined performance area, playing too grandly in that central spot would be more than overacting; it would be physically menacing. Chenot gauges how far the room, and his voice, can go.

With such a small space to fill, tonight’s final performance of Talk Radio is inevitably sold out. NHTC, which is already working on its November production of Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer, does not anticipate extending the run or moving the production elsewhere. Perhaps they could broadcast. Or perhaps a really big crowd will form on College Street tonight to see if Barry Champlain gets it through the night.

Peter Chenot in a promotional shot from Talk Radio, courtesy of New Haven Theater Company, which is presenting the Eric Bogosian drama in the Ultra Radio studios through tonight (Saturday, Sept. 17). Chenot doesn't actually smoke during the production.