Hot Air

by Robert Faires

Is the caller there?" They are four simple words, but for millions of Americans, they are more: they are a lifeline. When they are asked of a caller to a talk radio show, it is like a rope being thrown to a soul foundering in a dark and angry sea. If one is to judge by the amount of frustration and helplessness and anger voiced by talk radio's listeners, they are, many of them, people adrift in the modern world. They are the disenfranchised, the lost, the lonely, people who don't know their fellow citizens, their co-workers, their neighbors, who feel cut off from any sort of community in the world in which they move. For them, society is a great sea of impersonality threatening to swamp them. But those four words, and others like them, extend a line to these isolated figures; they acknowledge their presence, grant them their identity, and give them, however briefly, a connection to a community, the community of listeners like themselves.

That's the sense one gets listening to a lot of talk radio today, and it's the sense one gets listening to a lot of Talk Radio, Eric Bogosian's play about the subject. The well-known monologist's drama covers a night in the life of Barry Champlain, an acerbic on-air personality who hosts a late-night call-in show in Cleveland. Most of the folks who phone Champlain - there are 30 in the course of the play - are either venting about an aspect of modern life that upsets them or cooing to Champlain about what a neat guy he is and how much his show means to them. In both cases, the callers are trying to make a connection with someone they believe is of like mind. In Champlain's caustic commentary, they hear an echo of their own discontent, and they feel he is on their side. These callers are in error most of the time - Champlain's views are not their views; they're hearing in his diatribes only what they want to hear - but it is a measure of their powerful need to belong that they will find in this contentious talk radio host a soulmate and a brother.

That, however, is the story of the medium in the past 10 years and part of what makes Bogosian's play so apt for production right now. The number of talk radio stations in this country has quadrupled since 1985, the programs on them multiplying to an even greater degree. More and more Americans have begun tuning into these programs and using them as a forum for communication and/or connection. The air personalities who have distinguished themselves in this mushrooming format, the superstars of the industry - Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, G. Gordon Liddy, et al. - have been, almost to a man, abrasive antagonists in the mold (if not the political spirit) of Barry Champlain. They have, like Bogosian's fictional host, inspired devoted, often rabid followings. The "dittoheads" of real talk radio may be closer to the mark in hearing what their favorite gurus really said, but they are doing essentially what the callers in Talk Radio are doing: aligning themselves behind a bellicose individual they see as representing themselves. Talk Radio does not reflect everything that the industry is about today, but what it does reflect is very pertinent.

What's worth noting about Bogosian's play, though, is that it pre-dates most of the phenomenal growth of talk radio. The script was first produced in 1987, well before the ascension of Limbaugh and Stern into the national media firmament. That isn't to say that the picture it paints of a bunch of disaffected people allying themselves with an outspoken individual is anything new to our age; that story is as old as the race. Still, the play is prescient in its identification of the medium in which the latest playing out of that old tale is taking place. Bogosian saw something on the way in 1987, and he captured it on the page. Looking back from the vantage point of 1995, when talk radio hosts are accorded the status of movie stars and sometimes deferred to as if they are political leaders, Talk Radio the play also looks like the first pitch of rough water out on the ocean that eventually rolls into a massive wave that cracks upon the shore.

In producing their version of Talk Radio, opening this week at Hyde Park Theatre, the folks in The Company are interested in getting at the roots of the talk radio boom. The members of this two-year-old Austin stage group (which has produced to date A Few Good Men, Black Comedy, Orphans, Search & Destroy, and Rope) have spent a significant amount of time thinking about and discussing the social climate surrounding the increase in popularity of call-in radio shows and their TV counterparts, the interview/audience participation programs hosted by Phil, Oprah, Geraldo, Jenny, Rikki, Maury, and the like. The era that gave birth to the talk phenomenon was also one which saw rapid growth in the use of VCRs and of crime as a political issue. People began staying in their homes more, some out of convenience, some out of fear. Whatever the reason, they began to drift farther from each other and from personal contact.

"Do you know your neighbors?" asks Cathy Grant, a founding member of The Company and producer of Talk Radio. "We had to have a big media event the other day to get people to open their doors, actually go meet their neighbors, and speak with them. A sign of the times. Do I know my neighbors? Only my next-door neighbor, and I've lived in the same place for six years. Sad? I don't know, but our sense of community has been changing so dramatically. So we turn to a safe venue: the radio. No face-to-face, no prejudices, no class discerning, just voices expressing opinions that no one else will listen to - whether it be in anger, disgust, searching for an answer - hoping someone will `see it my way... for once.'"

In the Eighties, as the public turned to the media for those "safer" venues of communication, the media turned around the way it facilitated that communication. Prior to that time, air personalities fielding public calls were typically even in mood and expression of personal opinions. Much of this had to do with the Fairness Doctrine, the federal mandate that, prior to its repeal in 1987, required broadcasters to devote air time to public affairs and to give "equal time" to opposing points of view. Harv Morgan, who plays Sid in The Company's production, recalls the period vividly. Morgan is a longtime announcer who was present at the birth of talk radio; he was hosting a program on KYW in Cleveland in 1962 when the first tape delay system was developed, allowing stations to broadcast callers without fear of them using objectionable language. "It was very different back then because the host had to be non-partisan," recalls Morgan. "They could not espouse a `cause' but simply had to serve as the interrogator or referee between the guest and the caller. I remember when William Buckley was scheduled to be on my show, and he called and asked my producer `where I stood' politically. My producer said that `Harv is a wild-eyed middle-of-the-roader.' A Rush Limbaugh or a Paul Pryor couldn't even have gotten in the front door of a talk station back then. When deregulation came, everything changed. Now, anything goes."

Barbara George-Reiss, who directs this production, is interested in that turning point for talk radio and what it can tell us about the underlying anger that fuels so much of the on-air commentary. "We're all, in our guts, a bunch of angry folks right now. `Don't blow your smoke in my air.' `Don't merge into my lane ahead of me.' `Don't park in a Handicapped Zone.' `If you're handicapped, stay home out of my way.' `If you're homeless, stay out of my sight.' The list goes on and on. And instead of taking responsibility for the point to which we, as a nation, both collectively and individually, have come, we've taken the easy way out. We have learned to cast blame. `It's those damn Republicans.' `It's those damn Democrats.' `It's the millionaires.' `It's the folks on welfare.' `It's Commies or Jews or rednecks or skinheads or the old or the young.' How did we get here? At some point, we stopped believing, collectively, in the basic goodness of our fellow man and started being paranoid. And we got angry. Bogosian's Talk Radio gives us an avenue through which we can explore these thoughts and a chance to try to figure out which came first, the chicken or the egg. Did the angry talk shows of the Eighties set off the hatred of the Nineties or was the hatred there all along, buried somewhere else?"

It leads one to wonder: When we abandoned the Fairness Doctrine, did we also abandon the idea that we need to be fair? The members of The Company hope their show will spark some discussion of this and like questions, perhaps even over the airwaves, by the very kinds of callers they depict in their production. Nothing would please them more than to have their houses filled with the folks who tune in to talk radio on a regular basis. To do so would serve a double purpose for them: to reach their target audience for this play, but more importantly, to bring a group of people who only communicate unseen over wires into the same room where, at least for a couple of hours, they can be face-to-face and even talk in person. n Talk Radio runs Sep 7-30 at Hyde Park Theatre.