THE BLUE PENGUIN
[RADIO-SCRIPT]
Early BBC drama, first broadcast in 1926…
[Buffalo Courier-Express, November 16, 1930] “Entitled The Blue Penguin, the
initial playlet of the series depicts a page from the history of an old inn of that
name. Two brothers loved the same girl—and on this particular night, with a
storm at its height, the one whose love was unrequited has returned for
vengeance. The sign falling and a death does occur, but the drama has a surprise
ending.”
[Program information
ORIGINATION: 5 NO, Newcastle (BBC); et al.
DURATION: November 24, 1926; et al.
PERSONNEL: Herbert Rice (director—1930, WGR), Harold Simpson
(scriptwriter), Geoffrey Tempest (scriptwriter).
CAST [1926, 1927]: “…played by the London Radio Repertory Players.”
CAST [1930, WGR]: Fred Dampier, Ethel Hinton, Herbert Rice, William Tracey.
EXTANT RECORDINGS: None.
[Program log]
(5NO, NEWCASTLE)
[Wednesday—8:30-8:55 PM]
November 24, 1926 “The Blue Penguin”
(2ZY, MANCHESTER)
[Tuesday—8:30-8:55 PM]
December 7, 1926 “The Blue Penguin”
(2BD, ABERDEEN}
[Monday—8:00-8:22 PM]
January 10, 1927 “The Blue Penguin”
(6BM, BOURNEMOUTH)
[Monday—8:00-8:22 PM]
January 17, 1927 “The Blue Penguin”
(5SC, GLASGOW)
[Thursday—8:00-8:22 PM]
January 27, 1927 “The Blue Penguin”
[Monday—8:30-9:00 PM]
March 7, 1927 “The Blue Penguin”
(2RN, DUBLIN)
[Tuesday—10:00-10:30 PM]
October 16, 1928 “The Blue Penguin”
[“…Sketch by the Dublin Repertory Company…”]
[WGR, BUFFALO)
[Thursday—9:30-10:00 PM]
November 20, 1930 “The Blue Penguin”
[“…A superstition that clung about the historic inns of
England—that the falling of the sign outside the hostelry
foreboded a death—is woven into the first of fifteen typically
British radio dramas which will become a Thursday night
event…”]
THE BLUE PHANTOM
A WMBC production that for a time ran directly opposite both WJR’s The
Hermit’s Cave and WXYZ’s The Green Hornet.
ORIGINATION: WMBC, Detroit, Michigan.
DURATION: Circa 1936.
PERSONNEL: Unknown.
EXTANT RECORDINGS: None.
THE BLUE PHANTOM (WMBC, DETROIT)
[Sunday—10:30-11:00 PM]
March 22, 1936 “A Night at Wang Loos”
[“…Another episode in ‘The
Phantom’…”]
March 29, 1936
April 5, 1936 “Graveyard Plot”
[“…another episode in the
‘Phantom’…”]
April 12, 1936
April 19, 1936
April 26, 1936 “The Return of Martin
Winthrop”
[Now listed as ‘The Blue Phantom’”]
[Tuesday—10:15-10:30 PM]
July 7, 1936
THE BLUE SPHERE
[STAGE-PLAY; RADIO-SCRIPT]
This obscure one-act play by American novelist Theodore Dreiser was first
published in the December 1914 issue of The Smart Set, followed in 1916 by a
hardcover appearance in Dreiser’s Plays of the Natural and Supernatural.
“In Plays of the Natural and Supernatural by Theodore Dreiser, written in 1916
before the ‘psychological religion’ was so widely accepted, the author…assumes
that many spirits and forces whisper into the ears of human beings, causing them
to be wicked, heedless of ethical and moral responsibility, and to commit crimes.
The early Dreiser sees the same grim landscape as he later would depict in Sister
Carrie, but in the plays he sees this landscape animated by phantasmagoric forces
and creatures. There is even a malevolent spirit form he describes as ‘the Blue
Sphere’…[that] leads a disabled child toward the railroad tracks and an
‘accidental’ suicide.”
“…of a female shadow who employs a magical blue sphere to tempt a
deformed…”
[H. L. Mencken] “All five plays ‘of the supernatural’ follow a single plan. In the
foreground, as it were, we see a sordid drama played out on the human plane,
and in the background (or in the empyrean above, as you choose) we see the
operation of the god-like imbecilities which sway and flay us all. The technical
trick is well managed. It would be easy for such four-dimensional pieces to fall
into burlesque, but in at least two cases, to wit, in ‘The Blue Sphere’ and ‘In the
Dark,’ they go off with an air.”
[Margaret Tjader, Theodore Dreiser: A New Dimension (1965)] “…psychic
phenomena had always seemed real to him as when he had gone to séances, and
played with Ouidja boards, or glimpsed the strange, horrible faces he said he saw
sometimes around his bed at night.”
Billed as “It was presented over a German radio station last June… Verse for
‘The Blue Sphere’ was adapted by Mr. Dreiser from his book of ‘Plays of the
Natural and Supernatural’.”
“Theodore Dreiser’s play, ‘The Blue Sphere,’ which he has set to verse and
music, will be presented for the first time in America in this form… It was last
presented over a German radio station last June.”
[Cleveland Plain Dealer] “The cast will include Margaret Mower, whose last
appearance on Broadway was in ‘The Vikings’...
[Pittsburgh Press] “The first American production of a drama which Theodore
Dreiser wrote especially for radio will be the highspot of the [CBS] show tonight.
‘The Blue Sphere’ is founded on one of Mr. Dreiser’s recent short stories [sic] and
he is said to have insisted on making the adaptation himself in order that he
might avail himself of the advantages of the radio which is peculiarly fitted to his
symbolical realistic theme. ‘The Blue Sphere’ has had but one other presentation,
in Hamburg, Germany, a few months ago.
“Any work by Mr. Dreiser is interesting at this time because of the prominent
part he occupies as an exponent of realism in the current controversy on
Humanism. His best known works include ‘Sister Carrie,’ ‘The Genius’ and ‘An
American Tragedy.’”
[Dorothy Scarborough, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction, 1917] “He
gives curious twists to the unearthly, as in The Blue Sphere, where a shadow and
a fast mail are among the dramatis personae, typifying the fate idea of the old
drama. The shadow lures a child monstrosity out on to the railroad track, after he
has caused the elders to leave the gate open, and the train, made very human,
kills the child.”
[Keith Newlin and Frederic E. Rusch, The Collected Plays of Theodore Dreiser,
2000] “It is not Dreiser’s realistic plays, however, but his supernatural plays that
have had the most influence on subsequent playwrights… Thornton Wilder was
reportedly influenced by Dreiser’s expressionistic depiction of synchronous
movement. Richard Gladstone, who knew Wilder well, suggests that The Blue
Sphere in particular provided Wilder with a method for depicting ‘scenes of
continuous and even simulataneous action’ that Wilder would employ so
masterfully in Our Town.”
[Program information]
ORIGINATION: ha, Hamburg; WABC, New York City, New York (CBS).
DURATION: June 12, 1929 (ha); June 4, 1930 (WABC).
PERSONNEL: Georgia Backus (director—1930, The Voice of Columbia),
Howard Barlow (musical conductor—1930, The Voice of Columbia), Hans
Bodenstedt (translator—1929), Theodore Dreiser (scriptwriter), Hermann Erdlen
(music—1929), Lina Goldschmidt (translator—1929).
CAST [1930, The Voice of Columbia]: Jack MacBryde (Galloway), Margaret
Mower (Mrs. Delavan), Gertrude Riley (Mrs. Minturn), Anthony Stanford
(Peterson), Harry Swan (The Conductor), Louis Veda (The Shadow), Graham
Velsey (Delavan).
EXTANT RECORDINGS: None.
[Program log]
(HA, HAMBURG)
[Wednesday—8:00-9:00 PM]
June 12, 1929 “Die blaue Kugel”
[The Times: “Theodor Dreisser Programme—songs and
poems; ‘The Blue Ball,’ play…”]
THE VOICE OF COLUMBIA (WABC, NEW YORK)
[Wednesday—10:00-11:00 PM]
June 4, 1930 “The Blue Sphere”
[“…Theodore Dreiser’s play ‘The Blue Sphere,’ which he has
set to verse and music, will be presented for the first time in
America in this form…”]