The Craft of Audio Theater

Links to some resources with information about various aspects of the crafts and techniques used to make modern audio and radio drama.

| Training | Writing | Sound Effects | Listening |

"The thing that you were able to achieve in radio was involvement. Participation. Because you didn't have all the pieces to the puzzle. The person coming to the radio set had to bring some of the pieces and fill in. Even if there were forty people working in the studio, they were all concentrating on one ear."
-- Robert E. Lee (The Great American Broadcast, Leonard Maltin, P. 27-28)


Training for Radio Drama


Writing Radio Theater

"There was another pitfall good writers tried to avoid, which George Wells called the 'look-see' system,' a form of allegedly dramatic conversation in which a character carefully describes all visual incidents to a companion, or stooge. This treatment is supposed to make everything clear to the radio audience and usually does, including a vivid impression that the character regards his companion as four years old or totally blind. 'Look!' says the character. 'That car at the curb! A blue sedan with white sidewalls!'"
--The Great American Broadcast, Leonard Maltin, P. 31.


Sound Effects & Sound Design

"There's no set designer like your own self; you furnish the mise-en-scéne, the wardrobe, the physical proportions of the actor, and the setting. Then radio is doing something that television very rarely achieves."
--Norman Corwin (The Great American Broadcast, Leonard Maltin, P. 17)


Listening to Radio Drama

"A good radio play must have two things–an elemental dramatic situation and structural simplicity."
--C.L. Meuser, interviewed in Radio Digest
Radio is "at once both public and private. ... Radio is much more direct [than television]; it's one to one, whereas [with] television you're talking not to an ear, you're talking to an eye - a mechanical eye. Also, the eye is a very literal organ, and the ear is a part of the senses. The ear is the organ through which we receive, after all, the music of Beethoven, Brahms, and all the great composers, who don't speak a word to us. It's all said in symbolism, in symbolic harmonies and symbolic melody; even symbolic cacophony does something which enlists our collaboration, to the extent that we are required to collaborate as we are when we read a book. Then we are giving something. We are not just taking. Television, too often, puts the reader in the position of a passive receptor, of a spectator. This is less likely to happen in radio.
--Norman Corwin (The Great American Broadcast, Leonard Maltin, P. 17)



 Last updated July 24, 2000. ©2000 by Jerry Stearns. jstearns@mtn.org