We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
THE TROJAN WOMEN
The wide experience of those members of the program department who for years had been concerned with the choice and broadcasting of the old Radio Guild series was available to sift the suggestions of Mr, Davis for plays to be included in the Great Plays series, and, as a result, in the first season a wide sweep was made from the days of the Greek drama down through to a final play of the season by Maxwell Anderson that gave point to the studying of the theatre as a living force over two thousand years.
The response to the series was electric, and the number of stations carrying it in its second year was greatly increased in spite of the fact that the only available hour proved to be from i :oo to 2 too p.m. EST on Sundays, which meant that it was heard on the West coast at 10:00 a.m.
The temptation arose, of course, not to repeat any of the plays of the previous season, but the pitfall of putting in another play just for the sake of being different was warily avoided, and the second season did, as a matter of fact, include certain offerings that had been heard the year before, and this repetition turned out in no way to detract from the strength of the dramatic season.
The third season is already organized, and again plays heard in previous seasons will be broadcast, but whereas in the first year one Greek play, “The Birds,’’ of Aristophanes, was offered and in the second, a single Greek play, “The Trojan Women,’’ of Euripides, the third year will offer “The Antigone’’ and “The Alcestis,’’ both in modem translations made by Fitts and Fitzgerald.
The particular play printed in this volume opened the second year. In it Miss Blanche Yurka gave a heartrendingly powerftd performance as Hecuba, so much so that this, the greatest and oldest of plays on behalf of peace, reduced many members of the orchestra to tears and shook the conductor, members of the cast, and Mr. Burns Mantle, the veteran critic.
The function of the commentator in this series has been not so much to describe action or transition of scene but where possible to explain to the listening audience the social, economic, and political background of the times in which the play was written — not for stuffy, pedagogical reasons
547