LESS could well have been more, or, if you like, perhaps more might have seemed like less. Not that I wanted any less of Liev Schreiber’s hypnotizingly dazzling performance in Eric Begosian’s “Talk Radio.”
But I could have done with less of “Talk Radio” itself – or simply more of a real play than this nowadays obvious and repetitive character study in self-hating, control-freak absorption.
For despite the energized, valiant efforts of director Robert Falls and the whole cast, quite apart from Schreiber’s own deeply controlled virtuosity, the play, opening last night at the Longacre Theatre, today has the weary air of a one-trick pony, bristling with bells and whistles, stuck on a treadmill.
When first given in 1987 at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, “Talk Radio,” “based on an idea by Tad Savinar,” was a vehicle for the brilliant Bogosian himself.
At that time, I admired it a lot – calling it among a bunch of other nice things, “strange and important.”
The strange bit is still true. But important? Well, as a play I certainly don’t think it’s as important now as I did then.
I think the concept behind the play – the unenfranchized demagoguery of radio and TV loudmouths, those voices in the air purporting to be the face in the crowd – is still topical. But the play’s wild exaggerations and its texture have surely dated – our seducers are subtler now.
Set in a Cleveland, Ohio, radio station WTLK in 1987, “Talk Radio” suggests two hours (the play actually lasts only 100 minutes) in the on-air time of a late-night radio talk-show host, Barry Champlain (Schreiber).
With a laconic voice pitched somewhere between an anodyne and a sneer, he self-indulgently treats his despised radio audience with a stream of disdain and insult aimed at his call-in listeners, while copiously drinking Jack Daniel’s and even sniffing a furtive line of coke.
Seconds before the live show, Champlain has been told by the almost impossibly Machiavellian station manager Dan (a neatly smarmy Peter Hermann) that this broadcast is, in effect, an audition to take it into national syndication.
Naturally, Champlain behaves outrageously – not only reviling his audience, which presumably likes it that way, but even personally mocking advertisers.
During station breaks he also nonchalantly handles his production assistant and occasional girlfriend Linda (Stephanie March, here an appealingly downtrodden candidate for girls’ lib), his admiring sound guy, Stu (a spot-on Michael Lawrence), not to mention an on-air possible neo-Nazi bomb plot.
Then there is the wild and crazy punk-kid caller, Kent (an appropriately wild and crazy Sebastian Stan), invited to come to the station perhaps to kill this insanely provocative host in front of a live microphone and the bated-breath of listening thousands. No wonder Champlain finally has a meltdown.
The play is still, in part, entertaining, but Begosian’s over-the-top exaggerations jar likelihood, and perhaps nowadays even Champlain’s nihilistic lack of any specific political agenda – he’s vaguely leftish, but that is only part of the persona once constructed for him by the fiendish manager – makes the play’s one note sound dangerously off-key.
Falls’ staging of this wordy talkfest – not only of the actors we see but also the call-in voice-overs that play a major part in the proceedings – is superb. The acting has a spontaneity that almost belies the contrivances of the script.
And nowhere is that spontaneity more vital than in the perfect, supernaturally cool, tight little bundle of anger that is Schreiber’s Champlain. If there is a better actor on the stage today than Schreiber, particularly when he’s looking back in angst, I don’t know him.
The man’s a master and even by himself makes “Talk Radio” unquestionably worth a visit. But watch out for the verbal overkill.
TALK RADIO
* * 1/2
The Longacre Theatre, 220 W. 48th St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue; (212) 239-6200.