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A TRIP TO CZARDIS
Plays, the first important collection of radio dramatic material ever to be published.*
The story as Granberry has told it is a superb piece of I writing, intensely moving, economically wrought. Its mood
fastens itself upon the reader in the first few paragraphs,
I and it moves unpretentiously and quietly to its agonizing
[ conclusion by a series of half disclosures and submerged
revelations and by dark but meaningful overtones. One j becomes entirely acquainted with the Cameron family and
I does so seemingly without ever being told very much about
, them.
There is very little dialogue in the original and practically none at all of which the adapter can make use. The laconic snatches of talk that Granberry has given, the embarrassed taciturnity of the uncle, the natural reticences of the older (1 child, and the diffidence and docility of the younger — these
' j place an urgency of the most exacting sort upon the adapter.
'I He must reveal no more than the author has, and at the
,j same time he must keep his characters talking for thirty
minutes.
■ The adaptation succeeded in doing this. The invented
conversations that are given to the cast are exactly right " for each character in mood, in content, and in duration.
The use of the flash back to recapture the flavor of Czardis on a happier day is a piece of creative discernment that few writers in the craft can handle and that none can surpass. Yet this exists in the original only as the briefest whisper. Plausible inventions of this kind and masterful reconstructions of full personalities from fragmentary suggestion are possible only to those radio writers with a true gift of perception and sympathy. No discriminating ' reader, familiar with both the original and its radio adapta
tion, can believe other than that the finished script is precisely what the author of the story would have given us had he fashioned the piece for the broadcast medium.
* Columbia Workshop Plays, edited by Douglas Coulter, Associate Director of Broadcasts for CBS, was published by Whittlesey House, August, 1939
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