On today’s episode, we play three very timely radio dramas from our friends at Willamette Radio Workshop. The first, The Fall of the City, was written for radio by Archibald McLeish and first broadcast on the Columbia Workshop Radio Series, April 11, 1937. The cast featured 22 year-old Orson Welles, along with a young Burgess Meredith. McLeish wrote the play in verse, inspired by two historical events – the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany and the conquest of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, without resistance, by Hernán Cortés in 1521.
The second piece is Through the Turnstiles by Carole Dane, inspired by 9/11 and set in a post-apocalyptic world in the not-too-distant future, as two strangers meet in an otherwise deserted subway station.
The third and final piece, Minotaur in the Whitehouse by Jodi Lorimer, is a short monologue, that speaks of “an agent of chaos, the bull in the China shop of democracy, on a smash-and-grab mission of destruction and self-enrichment”. And asks the question “Where are the deities to punish this monster?” `
- KBOO