Air Rage
"Talk Radio" twenty years later.
By Hilton Als
Liev Schreiber as a bitter, belligerent radio host in Eric Bogosian's 1987 play.RACHEL DOMM
When it comes to artists, ambition is a tricky business. Whereas stockbrokers and politicians may labor with certain realistic goals in mind—greater riches, a Cabinet seat—artists' rewards are more elusive. The artist, possessed by the desire to perfect what can never be perfected, lives in a kind of uneasy truce with his given medium, hammering away at his blessing and his curse: his talent.
Happily for us, the thirty-nine-year-old actor and director Liev Schreiber, despite numerous successes onstage and onscreen, still seems to dwell in that anxiety-infused state of aspiration. As Naomi Watts's feckless, emotionally sleazy lover in last year's screen adaptation of Somerset Maugham's "The Painted Veil," Schreiber had a passion and a coldness that were practically clinical; the performance was a deep study in shallowness. Onstage last summer, as the star of the Public Theatre's "Macbeth," Schreiber served up not the character we've come to expect—all manly flaws and epaulettes—but an almost childlike wannabe king, with the power he craved dangling before him like a longed-for Christmas present. Though in recent years Schreiber has frequently been cast as a villain (he picked up a Tony Award for Best Actor for his performance in the 2005 revival of David Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross"), he is even more effective when playing the victim. As a struggling young Jewish husband in the 1999 film "A Walk on the Moon," he had a vulnerability that made viewers almost uncomfortable; unfortunately, few people want to see a grown man shed tears of hurt rather than tears of rage.
Like Meryl Streep, who helped him put a crooked spin on the mother-son scenes in Jonathan Demme's underrated 2004 remake of "The Manchurian Candidate," Schreiber has unconventional good looks. And although he works hard to make us forget them, it is his striking appearance that first grabs the audience in the current revival of Eric Bogosian's 1987 play "Talk Radio" (at the Longacre, under the direction of Robert Falls). In a dark T-shirt, jeans, and black boots, Schreiber's Barry Champlain enters the small Cleveland radio station where he is a late-night call-in-show host, carrying a cup of coffee and a lot of attitude. He's had a hell of a time driving to work. "I'm getting one of those Dirty Harry Magnums," he tells his producer, Stu Noonan (solidly played by Michael Laurence). "Next time some fucker cuts in front of me: BOOM! That's it. Or driving ten miles an hour: BOOM! Right turn from the left lane: BOOM! There should be a competency test for drivers. If they don't pass, they get shot."
It's spring, but love is the last thing on Barry's mind. His occasional girlfriend, Linda MacArthur (Stephanie March), who works at the studio, too, tells Barry that she waited for him for "a half hour last night. In the rain." Barry couldn't care less. "See, that's you," he says. "Me? I would've left." All Barry wants is to get behind the microphone. A jolly financial adviser named Sid Greenberg (the very funny Adam Sietz) is just signing off when Barry shows up. Sid has nothing in common with Barry, who, once he takes his seat, can't keep his vitriol to himself. From the start, it's clear that Barry's listeners talk too much for his taste. After all, it's his voice, his bile, that makes radio interesting.
Barry's first call is from a transsexual named Francine. (The excellent sound design is by Richard Woodbury.) Francine says that she's trying to save up enough money to have the operation that would change everything for her. But Barry's bored already. "You're a transsexual saving up for an operation?" he chides, talking into one of his two microphones. "You're a cliché. Call Larry King in D.C. I'll give you his toll-free number." Next call, please. And so it goes until Barry finally erupts at Stu. Why can't he put through more interesting callers? And as for those he's been listening to—well, Barry refuses to indulge in any kind of Miss Lonelyhearts sympathy shit with these freaks. They should all just suck it up. He has a show to do. Where are the interesting psychotics?
For Barry, the two microphones on his desk are no mere sound devices: they're the extra tongues he needs to lash out at the late-night losers, who cannot see, of course, that he is possibly the biggest loser of them all. While his callers may ramble and complain, at least they can say what they're feeling. Barry has plenty of language, but no words that can actually describe the pain he's in. Predictably, his emotional shortcomings are most violently expressed when anyone tries to get close to him. When Linda encourages Barry to eat, he throws the food across the studio. He claims to be angry about the way the show is going, but what he's really fuming about is Linda's attempt to care for him.
Bogosian has given Linda and Stu decent soliloquies in which they describe the love and disappointment they feel for this small-time star with a big-league neurosis, but it's Schreiber's gravel-voiced outrage that captivates us and binds all the characters together. Perhaps the only actor who doesn't seem like a supporting player here is the phenomenal Sebastian Stan, as a teen-age punk named Kent, one of Barry's callers, who tells lies on the air. When Kent shows up at the studio, it's clear that he's just a younger, less sophisticated version of Barry, hungry for attention in the station's insulated world. "You know what I'm talking about," he tells Barry. "Look at you, big star, famous guy, and you've got that fine fox right over there that works for you." Kent is high on something, and as self-absorbed as his idol. He's also a testosterone-fuelled doll, wired for violence. Pretending that his camera is a gun, he actually throws Barry for a moment. But it's just a moment. Barry is too compulsively self-possessed to crumble.
Structurally, "Talk Radio" seems somewhat indebted to Wallace Shawn's cerebral dramas about domestic cruelty: Stu's and Linda's overly literary musings are used as counterpoint to Barry's roiling wave of spite. But, unlike Shawn, Bogosian doesn't attack upper-class complacency; he's more interested in the forms that masculinity takes—and doesn't take. Although it is relatively slight, "Talk Radio," Bogosian's first theatre piece that was not a monologue, does have a certain relevance now—it's an early example of the tragedy of reality programming and of the undoing of a second-rate celebrity.
In any event, the show serves mostly as an excuse to watch Schreiber at work. Although Barry's misogynistic tone limits Schreiber, he is engaged here, once again, with the themes that seem to haunt him as a performer: how to be a man in the modern world, and how to be a man with the modern woman. Surely, given his ambition, he'll find more complex material through which to explore them.
The current revival of Robert Anderson's once shocking 1953 play about a troubled gay prep-school student, "Tea and Sympathy" (at the Clurman), is wonderfully directed by Jonathan Silverstein and, for the most part, well acted—as Laura Reynolds, the understanding wife of a homophobic housemaster, Heidi Armbruster is especially fine—but the reasons for mounting the show at all are dim. That we live in a country that is, for the most part, intolerant of difference is a given. But are there not enough young playwrights out there dying to stage new works about that difference? Do we have to keep dragging out polite works from the past that are, to say the least, dated? (The 1956 movie, with Deborah Kerr as Laura, is probably all the record of "Tea and Sympathy" we need.) Still, if you are interested in theatrical curios, by all means see it. There's another reason to see it, too: as Tom Lee, the much maligned, sensitive student whom Laura eventually falls for, Dan McCabe is singularly arresting. Using his lanky frame and often squeaky voice to convey the minefield that is adolescence, he reminds one of the early Dustin Hoffman. Alternately tentative, frightened, bewildered, and ironic, McCabe will be a star to watch for. ♦
Published in the print edition of the March 26, 2007, issue.
Hilton Als, a staff writer at The New Yorker, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He, most recently, published, "My Pinup," in November, 2022.
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