Play offers insight about shock jocks

Story Highlights

• Eric Bogosian's "Talk Radio" revived on Broadway
• Play offers insights into shock-jock culture, say cast members
• Show is using Imus firing as advertising jumping-off point

By Porter Anderson
CNN

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NEW YORK (CNN) -- Sometimes you find a silver lining in someone else's cloud.

After the storm over radio shock jock Don Imus' Rutgers slur and the resulting washout of his radio and TV show, the current Broadway revival of Eric Bogosian's 1987 drama "Talk Radio" is playing under a rainbow of new attention.

"Eric was nice enough to have us over to his house for a post-show gathering," says Stephanie March, who plays Linda MacArthur in the show at the Longacre Theatre on West 48th Street. ( Read about the firing of Don Imus' sidekick-producer )

"And we talked about how they're starting to run an ad in the New York Times for 'Talk Radio' that says, 'Before there was Imus, there was Barry Champlain.' " ( See a gallery of images from the new production of 'Talk Radio' on Broadway )

Barry Champlain is actor-playwright Bogosian's creation of the night-crawler's essential companion. The Times' late Mel Gussow in his review of the original production (with Bogosian in the role) summed up the caustic radio personality as "either a pilot fish or a piranha," depending on a listener's point of view. (Read Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's reactions to Don Imus' on-air slur )

Almost 20 years later -- and shortly after CBS chief Leslie Moonves announced Don Imus' firing -- the new production's lead producer, Jeffrey Richards, told the Times that business at the box office was up.

Out rolled the "Before there was Imus" ads.

"And of course the next thing we were thinking," March cracks, "is 'well, are we clever or suicidal?' "

"But of course, the Imus situation wasn't just that one wisecrack he made. It was a cumulative thing," March says.

Familiar as the icily principled assistant district attorney Alexandra Cabot on TV's "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," March lays in her point with typical precision: "It's simply that his number is up. People are completely tired of Imus."

The sequel

Peter Hermann, who plays a broadcast executive psyched by the interest of a syndicate in Champlain's show, says the abandonment of Imus by advertisers could work as the sequel to "Talk Radio."

A veteran of Shakespearean work as well as TV ("Law & Order: SUV," "Sex and the City," "30 Rock"), Hermann says he's struck by the centricity of celebrity in "Talk Radio" and the bad way it goes to Barry's head in Liev Schreiber's highly praised performance of the role.

What befalls Barry in the script's intermission-less journey into night is a shock jock's confrontation with his own ego. He's become more conversant with his unseen callers than with the real people in his life. He believes his fans' fantasies of who he is, basically buying his own PR as an edgy maverick of the airwaves.

Playing Linda, a lover Barry has rejected, March struggles to get back into the host's circle of attention. "I drew on the experience of having fallen for somebody -- and having a need to make it not ridiculous when things came apart," she says.

"To retell those moments from your own life never works," she says. "But having a chance to do this every night and feel this empathy for people" who have been jilted and end up looking like failed groupies: "I've just wanted to give it a sense of dignity."

March hovers and haunts Barry, her proud, hurting character hovering in the shadows as the radio show plays out.

Hermann, by contrast, takes a bravura approach to his role as the corporate whip, striding right into the play's collapsing core of celebrity and its toll on personality.

"Anybody, any human being," Hermann says, "whoever you are. You want to be liked. Maybe it becomes dark and you want it too much, but it's like a cancer, the cells start growing out of control and the need becomes too great. An identity grows out of that.

"The sad thing about it is that it's so human and so understandable. Everybody points a finger at people who are caught up in it. But it's tricky territory. Because in public life, if you try not to engage in the expected celebrity, you can be accused of being media-shy or stuck up."

Bogosian's script has Barry Champlain deride his listeners, accusing them of letting "your own lives become your entertainment" as they pour out their fears and opinions to him on the airwaves. When he defies station protocol and allows a caller (Sebastian Stan) to come to the studio and join him on-air, he's forced to see the instability and skewed expectations of the callers.

"And anybody in the middle of all this," Hermann says, "especially in the 24-hour news cycle, turning people over so fast these days, anybody can end up 'believing their own PR.' It's a simple perversion of human nature. We forget there's a human being in there."

The debate goes on, then, about the place of talk radio in our culture -- and the run of "Talk Radio" on Broadway, scheduled to play the Longacre through late June.

Clearly the hot-mic crack-up Bogosian wrote into his show 20 years ago has an application today that theatergoers as well as this cast are recognizing. Barry, wrote Gussow, "is trapped by his own excess" like "a train out of control."

"And the people around him," March says, "get really hurt. And have to try to live with that."

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