'Talk Radio' forces Zoo audience to tune in

Author: Emma Stanford

Last Friday, a team of Middlebury students led by director Matrina Bonolis '10.5 brought an audience back to the Reagan era to witness the inner turmoil of an acerbic, misanthropic radio host. "Talk Radio" was performed in Hepburn Zoo, if performed is an appropriate word. More accurately, "Talk Radio" seized its audience by the throat.

The play, written in 1987 by Eric Bogosian, centers on Barry Champlain (Dustin Schwartz '10), the slightly dysfunctional host of a local radio program called Night Talk. We see Barry's show on the night that it is being tested for national syndication. He plows through one oddball caller after another, abusing every political fraud and ridiculing every paranoid loner. Exasperating his coworkers at the radio station, Barry entertains a number of the wildest callers, shrugs off a bomb threat and invites a witless teenager to the show. In the end, however, he realizes that by ridiculing the world he is running away from it.

The claustrophobic space of Hepburn Zoo was used to enhance this in-your-face show. Barry Champlain sat at a metal desk scant feet away from the audience, with the other characters seated behind him, fielding calls and pouring coffee. In many cases the characters were closer to the audience than to each other. In one particularly well-staged scene, Barry and his assistant and love interest Linda (Cassidy Boyd '10) discussed their relationship on air, facing away from each other at opposite corners of the stage. Tense moments of dialogue were framed by advertisements for cigarettes and Harry's Restaurant, powerfully conveying the conflicts between public and private, real and commercial, on a talk radio program.

The success of a show like "Talk Radio" completely depends on the quality of the lead actor. As Barry Champlain, Schwartz was compelling and believable. He channeled the cynicism and energy of a young Dustin Hoffman, by turns misanthropic and compassionate. Slumped at his desk, swigging liquor or snorting cocaine, he perfectly captured the character of a dissipated idealist at odds with the world.

The show lagged, however, when the lights dimmed and one of the other three Night Talk workers described his or her relationship with Barry. Although these monologues offered an insight into the commoditization of a radio host, their substance and delivery seemed clichéd. As producer Dan Woodruff, Starrett Berry '09 in particular seemed to draw on every predictable gesture in the book: the set jaw, the sarcastic slow clap. Jimmy Wong '09.5 and Boyd offered more depth as they described their personal relationships with Barry Champlain, and J.P. Allen '11 nailed the character of a self-obsessed wannabe punk teenager, but Schwartz's performance made the show. Fielding callers, he treated the audience to one acerbic response after another. To a conservative caller protesting his endorsement of drug legalization, he snapped, "Drugs are not the problem. America is." When a neo-Nazi sent him a package purportedly containing a bomb, he stared at it calmly while the other characters panicked. When he opened the package and unfolded a swastika flag, the audience went quiet until he threw it on as a cape and started goose-stepping. Audience and characters alike were constantly waiting on his mercurial judgment, whether manifested as grim wit ("Stop crying, you're upsetting the baby," he told a pregnant teenager) or grimmer despair as he realized the shallowness of his work.

The show's best advantage was that it drew the audience so completely into the story. The audience was made privy to the reality and illusion of talk radio, as Barry fabricated a moving story about the Holocaust and then knocked back his drink. We saw the emotional strain placed on a talk radio host by his crazy callers. As Barry became disillusioned with humanity, so did we. At the end of the show, when Barry raced through caller after caller looking for a voice of sanity, the ensuing moments of dead silence were excruciating for an audience so invested in his character.

That kind of immediacy unfortunately came at a price. When Barry Champlain's attitude switched from hard-bitten satire to compassionate despair, it was difficult for such a devoted audience to switch with him. After being fed caricatured callers like so much hard candy, the audience could not be convinced, through a few serious moments, that no human life deserves ridicule. But throughout the play the callers' voices (rendered by actors offstage) had been cartoonish and their views extreme, whether proponing anti-Semitism or wondering why people weren't more like cats. To a certain point a play must be responsible for its content, and the show's portrayal of humankind seemed too facile. If we were as stupid and irrational as those radio callers, Barry Champlain couldn't be blamed for a little misanthropy.