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BEST DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE
The Steel Worker
by Arch Oboler
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HE DRAMATIC monologue is a radio rarity, and it is a
great misfortune that this is so. Henry Hull has appeared in one or two; Sheila Barrett and Cornelia Otis Skinner have been heard many times in humorous bits of monologue. A year ago Barbara Weeks gave Dorothy Parker’s famous piece, “The Telephone,’’ a splendid reading; Ruth Draper, greatest monologist of this generation, made her first and only radio appearance over four years ago. But the total does not add up to a trend or to anything sufficiently regular to be looked forward to as an established feature in radio as we know it today.
This situation may seem uninteresting and unimportant to many people, and I am not concerned with an argument for the case. I have said only that it is a misfortune, and I believe this not so much for the sake of the monologue itself as for the shift in conditions that explains its virtual disappearance. I do not wish to suggest a return of the bird imitator. Rather it is my feeling that America’s habits of entertainment have sustained a dislocation that nothing is going to change much very soon. Radio and movies and automobiles have done it. There are no more Chautauqua, no vaudeville, few popular lecture series, and no itinerant wits. Even circuses are having a bad time.
Although the public is still responsible for the type of entertainment it is currently receiving, it appears that the public no longer has much to do with it directly. America is being entertained by professionals; she has ceased to entertain herself. All one needs to do to determine how true this is is to compare an average Tuesday evening (after Information Please has signed off) with a Tuesday evening of twenty-five years ago. Nobody can recite any more, no one can declaim, and the business of elocution has passed
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