Long before the rise of podcast dramas, listeners worldwide tuned in to the audio-only narratives of radio plays.
Tom Stoppard and Arthur Miller were among the many playwrights who early in their careers completed brief pieces for radio, while such memorable dramas as Harold Pinter’s “A Slight Ache” and Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons” premiered as radio broadcasts. Radio work was often a way to bring in money and to refine the arts of plotting and dialogue.
When Tennessee Williams was a student at the University of Iowa in the late 1930s, still referring to himself by his birth name, Tom Williams, he completed a rarely-heard gothic sketch for radio called “The Strangers.” Williams’ play appears this week in The Strand Magazine, which has previously published little-known works by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck among others.
“The play incorporates all the theatrical elements of early radio horror,” writes Strand managing editor Andrew Gulli, “a storm, howling wind, shadows, a house perched over the sea, flickering candles, mysterious footsteps on the stairs, spectral beings — as well as early hints of the themes and devices Williams would return to in his most famous later works: isolation, fear, the shades of gray between imagination and reality, and a house haunted by memory and the private terrors of those who inhabit it.”
Blanche DuBois would famously invoke “the kindness of strangers” in Williams’ classic “A Streetcar Named Desire.” You could call this early work “The Horror of Strangers.” His play is set in a columned New England manor on the Atlantic coast, a “ghostly” home squinting under a lighthouse beam that casts a yellowish spell. The title refers to invisible demons who haunt two of the home’s residents, Mr. Brighton and Mrs. Brighton.
“We members of the human species are equipped with only five senses. Or six at the very most,” Mr. Brighton declares early on. “The Strangers are creatures that might be perceptible to us if we had seven or eight or maybe nine senses. But as it is, they exist just outside our little sphere of contact with reality and so … what we know of them is very, very slight.”
According to Williams scholar John Bak, “The Strangers” was among a handful of radio dramas the young playwright worked on while in Iowa, where he and his classmates were required to write and produce plays. Bak believes Williams was influenced by commercial considerations and by more personal forces.
Horror stories were popular on radio in the late ’30s, Bak says. Williams first thought of radio plays as an “exercise,” but he would eventually take them more seriously. While writing “The Strangers,” he was already haunted by the mental health struggles of his sister, Rose, who would later inspire the fragile Laura Wingfield of “The Glass Menagerie.” Williams would long explore the idea of madness, Bak says, and how we respond to people who seem to see things “no one else can see.”
