Eric Bogosian - Talk Radio

WRITTEN BY

ERIC BOGOSIAN

CREATED BY

ERIC BOGOSIAN

AND TAD SAVINAR

THEATRE COMMUNICATIONS GROUP
NEW YORK
2007

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.

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission secured from the authors publisher.

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This publication is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.

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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 showsDrama. I. Savinar, Tad. II. Title.

PS3552.O46T35 2007

812.54dc22

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

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 wasnt 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 Bergs 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 Olivers film it became even more important that each call build the dramatic tension of the story. Plays can enjoy taking time with charismatic momentsmovies cannot. Movies are like sharkswhen 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 Theaters 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 its differentthats the play you find here.

Its 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 sum, this play has had an unusual history, one that has brought many different creative people together in many different venues. Perhaps this is because Talk Radio is not really a play in the traditional sense of the word: it operates on various levels with the audience, it employs unseen actors while the lead is seated for most of the action, it moves forward via collage as much as by plot, it uses complex technology to create the radio station and the callers. The structure and texture were created during a long gestation process of trial and error.