“Chekhov always wrote about people gazing off into the middle distance,” says Martha Webster, a Chicago actress and director. “That’s what people did with radio. They gazed off into the middle distance and used their imaginations.”
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Webster missed working in the medium’s golden age–the 30s and 40s–by a few years, although early in her career she did a few radio commercials. Mostly she’s been in the musical-theater business, touring with shows like Bye Bye Birdie, Fiddler on the Roof, and Cabaret. In 1998 she joined the AFTRA/SAG Radio Players, a group dedicated to presenting re-creations of old radio scripts on the stage that was the brainchild of Chuck Schaden, host of WNIB’s Those Were the Days. For its first performance, the players–many of them well into their 80s–selected Cemetery by Arch Oboler, a classic creeper from the 1940s. That year Webster also produced and directed a 60th-anniversary retelling of the classic science-fiction drama The War of the Worlds, the original broadcast of which infamously caused panicked listeners to think that the earth was really being attacked by martians.
“For people who have not experienced radio, it can be difficult to watch one of our performances,” Webster says. “People today have to be entertained in bigger and bigger ways. Everything is in color, loud, with a laugh track. If you see people standing on a stage, you expect them to be doing something other than speaking. People who grew up with radio have no problem letting the imagination go free. I compare it to when you’ve read the book and you’ve already imagined how the characters are going to look and then someone makes a movie and you’re disappointed.”
–Vicki Quade
