As radio reinvented itself as a music medium in the 1950s, dramatic productions quickly fell out of favor. The competition from popular dramatic storytelling on television was too intense. While the counterculture movement of youth protest in the 1960s generated a demand for radio that offered a space for intelligent speech and alternative music, it did not support storytelling. Unlike the radio situation in Europe, Canada, and Australia, for example, American radio drama funding was not centralized into one service. Radio drama projects relied on entrepreneurial projects to raise funds from sponsors, private foundations, station budgets, and such public resources for cultural projects as the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The developing publishing market for spoken-word cassettes and CDs in the 1980s and 1990s provided further commercial collateral for production budgets.

Origins

Early U.S. drama developed in individual stations across the country. Even before World War I, Charles "Doc" Herrold organized schedules for a station in San Jose, California, which in 1914 included transmitting a live play. A drama series was broadcast by station WGY in Schenectady, New York, in ​​1922. The WGY players began with a full-length production of Eugene Walter's The Wolf and soon established a regular Friday night schedule of two-and-a-half-hour performances of anything from The Garden of Allah to Ibsen's The Wild Duck. For three years not a single playwright asked for payment. An orchestra provided music in the silences between scenes and acts. By 1923 the WGY players had launched a $500 radio drama prize competition to encourage scripts specifically tailored to the medium. The rules stipulated plays that were "clean," avoided "sex dramas," and employed small casts of five to six characters. One hundred scripts were submitted, but the play selected did not result in a successful broadcast.

As WGY productions began to be shared with other stations by early 1924, some of the actors were paid and other stations started radio drama centers of production. WLW in Cincinnati broadcast A Fan and Two Candlesticks by Mary MacMillan, which was followed a week later by the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. Drama became a weekly event. The transmission of When Love Wakes, an original play written by program manager Fred Smith, may have been the first play written especially for radio when it aired 3 April 1923, nine months before the transmission of Richard Hughes' Danger on the BBC in January 1924.

During these early years, radio stations realized that it was easier to control sound levels within a studio than to depend upon a theater stage as an arena for drama performance. In WGY's case, engineers designed microphones hidden in lamp­ shades in case actors became nervous at the sight of a bare microphone. Chicago's KYW took to the air specializing in broadcasting operas. Radio Digest observed in October 1923 that the radio play was increasing rapidly in popularity and that many eastern stations had their own theatrical groups. That same year, as a publicity device, WLW in Cincinnati provided airtime for the Shuster-Martin School to perform drama readings.

One of the first sponsored dramas was probably included in the Eveready Hour, which was launched in December 1923 on WEAF, New York City, to sell Eveready batteries. By 1927 the Eveready House program was producing a prestigious drama on a monthly basis, with each production auditioned before the sponsor three weeks before airing. Actors were now being paid $75 to $125 per performance. Rosaline Greene was praised for her portrayal of Joan of Arc.

Golden Age of Popular Radio Drama

  The golden age of U.S. radio drama really began in the late 1920s when first the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and later the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) began distributing networked programs. Drama was included along with dance and jazz concerts, because drama had "an aura of respectability." The titles included Great Moments in History, Biblical Dramas, Real Folks, Main Street, and True Story. For the next three decades, virtually all American network drama and comedy programs were in the format of series in that they used a continuing cast of characters and provided programs on a regular (usually weekly) schedule. Individual episodes usually stood alone, each one a complete story, but such fare was built around continuing characters who would be around the following week. The growing number of network series were supplemented with anthology (sometimes dubbed "prestige") drama programs, whose characters and stories both varied (such as the long-running Lux Radio Theater), with no containing elements save perhaps for a host and regular scheduled air time (and probably a sponsor).

One kind of radio series-the daytime soap opera-offered something additional; their continuing plot lines further focused the series to become a serial that combined continuing characters with stories that often lasted for years, with subplots melding into one another in a never-ending fashion. Each episode depended on the episodes that had gone before and led directly to the following episodes, though stories moved very slowly. Serial announcers usually began each episode with a paragraph or two describing what was happening for listeners who had missed any segments. The plots were purposely designed to hook listeners into regular attendance.

African-Americans and Radio Drama

  The cultural gulf separating the white majority from the African-American minority (until the civil rights movement of the 1960s) tended to distort and sometimes censor the presentation of the black identity and story-telling culture. African­ American performers had negotiated roles in white-interpreted ​​and -mediated arenas for popular storytelling. Although African-Americans performed some parts in Amos 'n" Andy (1928-60), "blacked up" whites Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll played the central characters; Madaline Lee played the duo's secretary Miss Blue; and Eddie Green performed the role of Stonewall, the lawyer. To put it mildly, this was an unsatisfactory context for the expression of African-American identity. Eddie Anderson's role as Rochester, Jack Benny''s black valet, represented mainstream participation in radio's popular story-telling culture, but was also controversial in the perpetuation of the "Jim Crow" syndrome of racial stereotyping. Another distorting and comic exploitation of African-American women as maids was the character and series Beulah (1945-54). The first actor to play Beulah was William Hurt, a white man, who coined the character's famous catchphrases "Love dat man!" and "Somebody bawl for Beulah?" The paradoxical ambiguity of radio's representation of stereotypes became evident in 194 7 after Hurt died from a heart attack and the Academy Award-winning African-American actress Hatie McDaniel took over the part.

World War II saw the introduction of positively drawn African-American soldier characters in daytime serials as the U.S. government sought to promote the contribution of black servicemen and reduce racial tension within the armed forces.

The problem of negative racial stereotypes and chronic discrimination against African-Americans' participation was challenged by the work of Richard Durham at WMAQ in Chicago between 1948 and 1950. Durham originated, wrote, and directed a series called Destination Freedom that dramatized the stories of black achievers such as Benjamin Banneker, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, Marian Anderson, and Joe Louis. Durham had been editor of the black newspaper the Chicago Defender. The scripting of 91 half hour episodes and their production remains a significant event in American radio drama history. The most notable and widely praised episode was the dramatization of the accomplishments of heart surgeons Dr. Daniel Hale Williams and Dr. Ulysses Grant Dailey in "The Heart of George Cotton," originally aired in Chicago on 8 August 1948 and restaged in 1957 on the networked CBS Radio Workshop.

In 1944 Langston Hughes collaborated with the British radio drama producer D.G. Bridson to create a ballad-opera exploring the friendship between black Americans going to war with the people of Britain. The cast included Ethel Waters, Canada Lee, Josh White, and Paul Robeson; The Man Who Went To War was produced and performed in New York but only heard via shortwave by ro million BBC listeners in Britain. Langston Hughes also wrote Booker T. Washington In Atlanta, commissioned by the Tuskegee Institute and CBS. Despite joining The Writers' War Board after Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he faced blacklisting pressures from the House of Un-American Activities from October 1944. Erik Barnouw wrote that even when American networks had commissioned and produced work by black writers, affiliate stations in the Southern states would often block the broadcast by substituting a local program of musical records.

Sustaining and Prestige Drama

  Experimental radio drama of exceptional quality was produced in the United States during the golden age as a by-product of the commercial success of the networks. Advertising profits financed such programming in unsold time. A "marquee status" in radio culture sparked by competition between CBS and NBC helped to generate such programs. Even the poor relation of U.S. radio networks, Mutual (MBS), would commission 21-year-old Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre to produce a six-part dramatization of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables in 1937-ambitious storytelling and dramatic performance on a grand scale. Through a series called Columbia Workshop (1936-47), CBS was the first network to experiment with using sound effects for creative and cultural storytelling. Starting in July 1936 the programmers advanced radiophonic techniques for sparking the imagination. The discovery of sound filters that evoked ghostly phenomena gave birth to The Ghost of Benjamin Street.

The production of the script The Fall of the City by poet Archibald MacLeish presented a social and political attack on totalitarianism and ambition in production. The large "crowd" cast, the special location of performance at New York's Seventh Regiment Armory, and the quality of the cast, which included Burgess Meredith and the young Orson Welles, combined to establish a radio drama broadcast on 4 March 1937 that defined the potential of the medium. The Fall of the City invested production confidence in the idea of a drama written in verse for radio. Barnouw (1945) described the resulting competition for prestigious drama projects between the networks. CBS contributed a series of Shakespeare productions featuring John Barrymore. NBC recruited Arch Oboler, who started with a production of his own play Futuristics and then persuaded the network to support a series of experimental horror stories, Lights Out. Oboler founded a tradition of science fiction horror and melodrama that continued in a series bearing his name.

CBS also signed up Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air (1938). A formidable production, performance, writing, musical composition, sound design, and directing team of Orson Welles, John Houseman, Howard Koch, and Bernard Herrmann fashioned classic and contemporary novels and plays into highly charged hour-long sequences of live radio entertainment. The subtle sound-design creativity of Ora Nichols advanced the interface of sound and imagination for listeners. The adaptation of the H.G. Wells' novelette The War of the Worlds at the end of October 1938 would write radio ​​drama into social and cultural history and send Orson Welles and his troubadours to Hollywood.

It was also in 1938 that CBS vice president William B. Lewis hired Norman Corwin to make a series of half-hour programs on Sundays to experiment with poetry. Corwin would become a tour de force in writing and radio drama. The series Words without Music, Pursuit of Happiness, and Twenty-Six by Corwin established his reputation. From his verse play for the festive season of that year, The Plot to Overthrow Christmas, to constitutional and historical pageants such as We Hold These Truths, Corwin contributed a body of literature and direction for radio that resonated in and had considerable influence on the English-speaking world. The poetics of his writing was also embedded with political poignancy; They Fly through the Air was an audio equivalent of Picasso's famous painting on the bombing of Guernica, and his Seems Radio ls Here to Stay is a verse essay on the beauty and potentialities of the medium.

An analysis of Corwin's verse play The Undecided Molecule, aired only weeks before the detonation of the atomic bombs in Japan in 1945, reveals writing, directing, and performance in advance of its time. Groucho Marx played the role of a judge metaphorically trying the idea of the atom bomb and mankind's use of it in a surreal courtroom. It was a culturally and politically subversive weave of irony, spiced with postmodernism and existential wit and a tour de force of production and performance that served to define Corwin's power and achievement in the history of world radio drama. It was also an elegant and powerful demonstration of radio drama's literary credentials.

Detective Drama

  The golden age produced a genre of audio-noir detectives both male and female. The Adventures of Maisie, featuring a character who globe-trotted the high seas from one exotic port to the next, began with a man being slapped when asking for a light and the catchphrase "Does that answer your question, Buddy?" The Adventures of Nero Wolfe, based on the popular novels by Rex Stout, proved that you could be a good private detective and so fat that your assistant Archie would have to do all your legwork for you. The Fat Man (1946-51) had the central character Brad Runyon starting each episode as the announcer spoke these words: "There he goes into the drug­ store. He steps on the scale. Weight 237 pounds! Fortune: Danger!" The Adventures of Philip Marlowe (1947-51), The Adventures of Sam Spade Detective (1946-51), and The Adventures of the Thin Man (1941-50) arose out of the successful novels and films featuring the characters so named. The character Nora Charles, first played by Claudia Morgan in the radio series, amounted to a curious blend of femme fatale and positive gender representation. Nora, with a voice that purred ​​with sexuality, was a supersleuth. Martin Kane, Private Eye (1949-53) was an example of a radio detective series that made the successful transformation to television. The highly successful Sherlock Holmes (1930-36; 1939-46) culminated with British actors Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in the roles of Holmes and Watson.

The invisibility of radio extended the boundaries of imagi­ native devices in story telling. The Shadow (1930-54) worked best on radio because the character had the power to be invisible. The Shadow and other series, such as The Green Hornet (1936-52) and Nick Carter-Master Detective (1943-55), transplanted the myth of the Western into the urban environment. The Western was also present in U.S. popular drama through, among others, the series The Lone Ranger (1934-56). The Adventures of Dick Tracy (1935-48) was based on the comic-strip detective created by Chester Gould and is another example of the radio detective genre that cross-pollinated newspaper/magazine comic strips and films.

The police radio series was a cultural mechanism for the mythologizing of Edgar Hoover's FBI or "G-men" and the large-city police departments. Notable series included Dragnet, Call the Police, Calling All Cars, Crime Does Not Pay, Gang­ busters, Famous Jury Trials, Official Detective, Renfrew of the Mounted Police, Silver Eagle Mountie, This Is Your FBI, The FBI in Peace and War, True Detective Mysteries, and Under Arrest.

The detective genres generated controversy because of their stereotypically negative representations of Asian-Americans. Charlie Chan (1932-48) was built around an Asian-Hawaiian private eye who was always played by white American actors. The series Fu Manchu ( 1929-33 ), arising out of the Collier magazine stories, offered another example of the demonizing and typecasting of Chinese or Asians as "untrustworthy, inscrutable" villains.

"Soap Opera" Drama

  Conditions for developing a thriving market of radio serials were ripe in 1930s America. National networks were expanding because they provided "free" entertainment once one owned a receiver. Further, and despite the Depression, there was a continuing market for products that could improve the quality of life in the home, including soap products and washing machines. Radio provided an excellent means of reaching out to the growing market of women concerned with such purchases, and seeking entertainment. Radio could meet the demand for entertainment about family and identity, about fantasy and the idea of home, about struggle against adversity and achievement, and about people who could be admired and respected. From these circumstances, the soap opera was born. In Los Angeles Carlton Morse began writing episodes for the series One Man's Family in 1932; it would last for 28 years. The story of the Barbour family depended on its addictive narrative drive for its success. Radio had become the stage for its own popular American version of Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga. In 1939 Morse created I Love a Mystery, featuring the exotic adventures of three global adventurers from the A-1 Detective Agency. He wrote every word and directed every script; his craft had him up at 4 A.M. and kept him busy seven days a week. Barnouw (1945) wrote that radio was becoming a mecca for acting talent that could no longer find work in the theater. Radio was helping listeners-and more than a few creative people-buck the Depression.

Serials that charted social mobility and advancement secured lucrative sponsorship because the audience could identify with the reality and aspirations such programs embodied. The Goldbergs ( 1929-50) performed the ritual of a social journey from the Lower East Side of New York City into the middle-class suburbs; Pepsodent was a product that helped enhance the smile on their faces. Writer and actor Gertrude Berg created The Goldbergs in her quest to dramatize Jewish family life. Susan J. Douglas (1999) has observed the value of the research by Herta Herzog into the relationship between women listeners and soap operas: "The melodramatic narratives and strong female characters of daytime serials-coupled with the intimacy of the medium-provided powerful points of identification." Herzog's research in the 1930s showed that, to one woman listener, soap opera "teaches me as a parent how to bring up my child." Popular radio drama during the golden age was an opportunity for women's self-empowerment, and as Barnouw observes, "Almost one-third [of listeners] spoke of planning the day around serials." Little Orphan Annie (1930- 42) could be comfortably associated with the coziness and nourishment of the Ovaltine bedtime drink. Myrt and Marge had the attitude that came with chewing gum made by Wrigley. Buck Rogers 25th Century (1932-36, 1939-40, 1946-47) was the kind of dream that listeners could think about when crunching on their breakfast cereals produced by Kellogg.

Many of the key producers and writers who controlled the form were highly educated and independent women. Ima Phil­ lips probably wrote more words and made more money in the field of soap opera than anyone else. Her prodigious industry was founded in Chicago, and once she hit her stride no one could match her ability to invent story lines or dictate six scripts a day and write 3 million words a year. She was the creator of Today's Children, Woman in White, Right to Happiness, The Guiding Light, Road of Life, and Lonely Women. Her gift to the history of gender representation is that she invented and sustained women characters who were role models to American women listeners because they had strength and dignity and could hold their social position equally with men.

Another key center for popular series and serial production was founded and developed by advertising executive Frank Hummert and his assistant Anne S. Ashenhurst, who later ​​became his wife. They established a team of writers distinguished by the talented Chicago Daily News reporter Robert D. Andrews, who probably generated more than 30 million words of storytelling for radio. Andrews' first serial story was Three Days Lost. Within a year of being hired by the Hum­merts he was turning out five radio scripts a day. The author of a book on How to Write for Radio was convinced that Andrews was really three or four writers and that his name was the brand title of a writing syndicate. The Hummerts generated legends in the tradition of soap opera entertainment, some of which transferred to television.

     In some respects the soap opera boom of the golden age could be described as the "Wild West of Writing." It was a Klondike for authors, advertisers, and networks because 80 percent of the programming of a network station in a big city market in 1939 was made up of wall-to-wall daytime soap episodes, most of them merely 15 minutes long. Elaine Carrington was an example of a short story writer who found that her ability to produce story outlines and scripts for daytime serials could make her a rich author. She conceived and wrote Red Adams, which became Red Davis and then Pepper Young's Family as the sponsors changed.

     In the daytime soap by Jane Crusinberry, The Story of Mary Marlin (1935-45, 1951-52), Crusinberry dramatized a character who became a female U.S. senator. Mary Marlin was one of the highest-rated daytime serials after 1937, and because Crusinberry retained control of all the writing, the series was able to transcend the political and social compromises that arose from sponsor-controlled "factory writing." During World War II Crusinberry originated and wrote a series called A Woman of America ( 1943-46), which starred Anne Seymour and dramatized the history of achieving women in the United States.

The Legacy of World War II

  The political struggle between communism and fascism through the 1930s and the years of World War II coincided with the most intense period of the "Golden Age" of radio. Howard Blue (2002) examines the work of 17 radio dramatists and writers who deployed the radio drama arts in their battle against fascism. Between 1941 and 1945 they were allied with commercial radio networks, private agencies, and U.S. government propaganda organizations that wished to rally the listening imagination in the fight against German Nazism and Japanese militarism.

     Blue documents how the chill wind of the Cold War made casualties of left of center writers, directors, and actors who had been politically motivated in their creative engagement with radio drama during wartime. The personal memoir by the radio actor Joseph Julian, published in 1975 as This Was Radio, provides a compelling and agonizing account of how Senator Joe McCarthy's witch-hunting could snuff out a career virtually overnight.

     The compendium of 25 radio plays edited by Erik Barnouw and published in 1945 as Radio Drama in Action represents a significant body of literature from this period of broadcasting. Morton Wishengrad's The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto, broadcast by NBC on the eve of the Day of Atonement in 1943, demonstrated how radio dramatization of actuality could succeed where radio journalism had failed. There was no effective contemporary reporting of the extraordinary rebellion by young Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1942. Wishengrad's research and literary imagination combined with the direction of Frank Papp, a music score by Morris Mamorsky, and acting performance by Arnold Moss to represent a vital moment in history.

Radio Drama in the Shadow of Television

     With the development of U.S. network television beginning in 1948, radio drama's days were numbered. Within just a few years, audiences and advertisers had begun the rapid migration to the video medium, and network schedules grew sparse. The McCarthy witch hunts and Cold War paranoia also damaged American radio drama at the same time. Opportunities for significant network projects and corporate sponsorship were not coming to anyone who was perceived to be left of center. Orson Welles, Norman Corwin, and Paul Robeson had characteristics and track records that could be regarded as left wing. Along with thousands of talented writers, actors, and directors, they could be perceived as politically subversive. Black­ listing generated self-censorship and drove a community of artists into exile. Others were silenced, their credentials ruined. Perhaps one of the more absurd manifestations of this cultural anomie was the 1952-54 syndicated series I Was a Communist for the FBI, in which film actor Dana Andrews infiltrated organizations as a double agent and week by week roamed episodes with titles such as The Red Among Us, The Red Waves, and The Red Ladies.

     Money and talent became concentrated in television. There were courageous and worthy projects, such as CBS Mystery Theater between 1974 and 1977 produced by Himan Brown, which tried to turn back the clock. Such ambition and concentration of resources, however, was not sustained by audience figures and the interest of sponsors.

Drama on Public Radio

     With the end of commercial radio's golden age in the early 1950s, radio drama was for many years an art hidden behind the cornucopia of television programming. Still, the mutually advantageous relationship between the Hollywood film industry and radio networks during the 1940s and 1950s exemplified by Lux Radio Theatre, Hollywood Hotel/Premiere, and Hollywood Star Preview/Star Playhouse, Star Theater left seeds for future development and opportunity. In the 1970s Himan Brown produced original radio dramas for CBS radio. Still later, George Lukas donated the sound rights of his Star Wars stories to his former university radio station. National Public Radio (NPR) invested more than $200,000 in a 13-part dramatization including members of the film's cast, music composer, and sound designer.

     Satellite distribution generated a renaissance in interest in audio drama and created a new audience among young people. In some respects interest in the U.S. Star Wars project was similar to the interest shown by young audiences in Britain in the radio series The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy. Filmic music and multi-track sound design techniques combined with the cult of science fiction to produce success.

     The period 1971 to 1981 witnessed the development of Earplay, a National Public Radio Drama Production Unit based in Madison, Wisconsin, under the artistic direction of Karl Schmidt. The project was substantially funded from federal sources and generated radio drama script competitions for new writers. It eventually developed large-scale collaborations with the BBC in England and commissioned well-known established writers such as Edward Albee, David Mamet, and Arthur Kopit.

     National Public Radio's rival American Public Radio (APR, which later became Public Radio International) also generated interest in original spoken word storytelling through the work of Garrison Keillor in Minnesota. NPR, in Washington, D.C., continued to courageously distribute NPR Playhouse, but, despite the enthusiasm of producer Andy Trudeau, radio drama became a cultural artifact in the tapestry of U.S. radio. Trudeau even commissioned an original series of new Sherlock Holmes dramatizations starring Edward Petherbridge, and NEH and NEA funding supported worthy cultural drama projects such as Samuel Beckett and German Horspiel seasons, which were the initiative of Everett Frost. Unfortunately, the poor take-up by NPR affiliate stations of NPR Playhouse programs resulted in its demise in September 2002.

Independent Producers and Radio Drama by Artisans

     American radio drama has moved from a mass-appeal service based on daily or weekly series to a far narrower format aimed at small but elite audiences. There would appear to be no shortage of ambition and commitment from small independent producers all over the United States who use efficient modern digital technology to produce original plays and dramatizations that are crafted for a connoisseur audience mainly in public radio. New York-based independent producer Charles Potter and Random House have established a niche interest in the radio Western, with audiobooks that sell well in the retail ​​market and are also carried by some radio stations over rhe air. The internet, the audio drama cassette/CD/minidisc market, and digital radio offer accessible, low-cost networks of distribution. Furthermore, it is a low-risk genre for ideas and counter-culture. Companies such as Ziggurat, ZBS Foundation, Atlanta Radio Theatre, The Radio Repertory Company of America, Hollywood Theater of the Ear, The Radio Play­ The Public Media Foundation, Midwest Radio Theatre Workshop, LA Theatre Works, Shoestring Radio Theatre, and many others have established significant output of original productions. Notable directors/dramatists include Yuri Rasovsky, Eric Bauersfeld, Joe Frank, and David Ossman.

     During the 1980s and 1990s, WBAI, the Pacifica radio station in New York, was the arena for an interesting development in the art of the live community radio play. The station's arts director Anthony J. Sloan catalyzed much of this work. Sloan observed that"Most people taped drama because it's safer. BBC does radio drama every day, but it's canned. I like live radio drama because the adrenaline flows for the actors. They know that not only is this live, but, guess what, it's only one-time. You get some incredible performances." Sloan orchestrated a series of media pageants that have occupied the streets of New York, the studios of WBAI, the satellite frequency of Pacifica Network programming, and the worldwide web with orchestras of musical, dramatic, and acoustic artistic expression fused by captivating, bold narratives. The predictions were not short half-hour or one-hour sequences. They spanned five-and-a-half hours of airtime. Philosophically challenging, politically controversial, intellectually stimulating, emotionally invigorating dimensions of communication combined with complex sound production techniques and live performances on the sidewalks of the Lower East Side and various landmarks in the urban geography of New York City. The grassroots dimension of this work was an indicator of how radio drama could strengthen its identity and cultural value with its audiences. The Leaving(s) Proiect, transmitted on the night of 2.6 January 1996, comprised two live story-telling events over five-and-a-half hours. Larry Neal's play The Glorious Monster in the Bell of the Horn was presented before a live audience at the New Knitting Factory in the Tribeca section of Manhattan. The play was structured in the style of the epic opera based on the Brothers Grimm's Peter and the Wolf, wherein characters are identified by musical instruments. Then the multimedia event blossomed into "a journey piece" from different locations of the New York metropolitan area. There were six different groups of characters leaving New York for various reasons who were forced to deal with personal crises on their way to an Amtrak train at New York's Penn Station. Their interweaving storylines highlighted current social, political, spiritual, and artistic issues. All the disparate journeys were acted out live with moving microphones on location and culminated in a dramatic finale at Penn station. The realism of the event is indicated by the fact that the fictional characters intended to board the 3:45 A.M. Amtrak red-eye service leaving New York, which was actually waiting to leave one of the platforms at the end of the broadcast. The event began at 10 P.M. on Friday night and continued until 3:45 the following morning. It could be heard in stereo on WBAI 99.5 FM, received by satellite on 360 community radio stations, and heard nationally and internationally on the world wide web.

     Early 21st century U.S. radio drama can be described as "the age of the artisan," whereas the period before the 1950s could be described as "the age of the Network." Audio dramatic techniques are also widely used in advertising and public information spots, so narrative creativity in radio is not a totally lost art.