TALK RADIO reviews
Review from ARMENIAPEDIA by Aram Kouyoumdjian on April 11, 2006
Crisp production values were on full display in the Gangbusters Theatre Company’s staging of “Talk Radio,” which had a limited run at Theatre 68 in Hollywood. This early play from Bogosian’s canon, virtually devoid of plot, dramatizes an hour from the talk show of controversial (and fictional) shock jock Barry Champlain the night before his show is to go national. Scenic designer Danny Cistone’s meticulous replica of a broadcast studio provided the perfect setting in which Champlain, winningly portrayed by Christian Levatino, would expose his callers’ demons while struggling with his own.
In a strong ensemble, Jonathan Burbridge stood out as Champlain’s call screener, perfectly balancing Levatino’s intensity with a casual portrayal punctuated by both laughs and poignancy. Equally worthy of mention was Matt Mann, riotous in his scene-stealing turn as a drugged-out fan who finagles his way onto Champlain’s show.
The play, however, belonged to Levatino, who constructed a complex character in Champlain, even as he unleashed Bogosian’s words with all their intended fury. In Levatino’s hands, Champlain’s rage was explosive and profane, his introspection solemn and quiet. One could not help being struck by the depth of his performance, which revolved, for significant stretches of time, around a microphone. But Levatino practically gave life to this inanimate object in developing an organic, even visceral, interaction with “callers” who never appeared onstage.
Director Leon Shanglebee confidently helmed the edgy work, managing to keep focus where the script meandered. Even in its deviations, however, Bogosian’s raw, intense, and kinetic writing always maintained tension and commanded attention.
Review from REVIEWPLAYS.com on April 4th, 2006.
It's a cold rainy Tuesday night, the kind of night where the steady drizzle makes the streets look like they were made of broken glass, and as we try to search for the entrance to Theatre 68, which is in the back, on the corner in the dark, a thought crosses the mind - - - will anybody show up to see this play tonight? One would have to be crazy to go out on a night like this!
Imagine the surprise upon entering the small lobby and a crowd of people is already huddled near the entrance waiting for the house to open - and even more of a surprise as people keep coming in eventually filling what has to be a 45 plus seater with good lines of sight from almost anywhere, a broad open stage and comfortable seats. Not many theatres get a full house on the fourth week of the run, so we suspected someone had told two friends, who had told two friends, and so on. Oh yes, speaking of two, there are two (count them) TWO bathrooms in the lobby area, a luxury in most smaller houses.
So we sit back and let The Gangbusters Theatre Company take us back twenty years to 1987, as the PR notes point out, before Howard Stern, before Rush Limbaugh, before Tom Leykis, to the time of Barry Champlain, direct from Akron via Eric Bogosian's imagination, to WTLK AM in Cleveland, an all talk radio station where Barry is the enfant terrible of the airwaves.
Barry's shtick is simple and straight forward. He's a jerk. He yells at callers, hangs up on them, insults them and yet they keep calling, pouring out their hearts, their ideas, their anger and even their insults at times, but Barry keeps one step ahead of them, spouting his philosophy, his ideas and making his disdain very evident. This is Barry's last night as a local host, as he prepares for national syndication on the next day and while it's never openly admitted, it's very clear that Barry has a great deal of trepidation and insecurity about the move.
It's hard to describe the action, because there's very little. It's hard to describe the dialog because there is so much. Much of it is from the callers, and most of it is banal idle chatter. But if you listen carefully to both sides, it soon becomes evident that there's a great deal going on between them. As off-center as he is, many see Barry as a source of strength and inspiration, almost idolizing him even though he thinks most are pitiful losers with no brains or ideas of their own.
However, we suspect that his greatest fear is that he is actually just like one of his callers, and that somehow he will eventually be found out.
Author Eric Bogosian, who has been called a one-man hate group, has never been accused of being bland or mainstream and while this may be one of his tamer pieces, there is an explosiveness to his words that compel you to listen. In the hands of Christian Levatino as Barry Champlain, the material is beyond explosive - it's almost nuclear. Five minutes into the show you forget this is theatre and you become part of the radio audience - listening to the wretched souls who hope to find solace in a world of Amplitude Modulation. You cringe when Barry and board operator Stu (Jonathan L. Burbridge) make fun of the callers and you sweat when Kent calls and tells Barry his girlfriend overdosed and may not be breathing.
There's no description that can portray the images brought when a caller admits to having raped several women and claims he's about to do it again.
Delivering quality performances all around, the excellent cast is comprised of Mary Kelsey as Linda the producer; Bart Perry as Dan, executive producer and techie Spike played by Daniel Paul. The callers are Sierra Fisk, Mancini Graves, Missy Hairston, Matthew Heron, Heidi Huber, Trent Hopkins, Jamie Jones, Stephanie O'Niell, Rob Saunders and Scott Sobol.
Other station personnel are played by Scott Sobol as Sid Greenberg, the money show host and his techie, Rob Saunders, Dr. Susan Fleming, the stations on-air shrink played by Sierra Fisk and her tech Matthew Heron. Matt Man plays Kent, the young caller who claimed his girlfriend overdosed only to find an excuse to find his way to the radio station.
Director Leon Shanglebee manages to make the off-stage voices of the callers as riveting as the visual presence of Barry, and in the 80 plus minutes of the show, every emotional button gets a couple of firm pushes, sometimes eliciting laughter, sometimes anger and once in awhile sadness and fear. Don't think this play is anything like the movie by the same name.
Whatever you thought of the movie, if you saw it, forget about it, because this show is more realistic and touching than most visual experiences you could have. At the end when Dr. Susan Fleming comes in to do her program, you almost hope you can stay and listen - - - but that's possibly for another show at another time.
The rain was still coming down hard after the show, but it really didn't matter anymore. It was easy to understand why so many people had braved the cold and the rain on a dark Tuesday evening, and somehow, nobody seemed that crazy anymore.
Review from the Martini Republic on April 5th, 2006.
The Gangbusters Theatre Company presents Eric Bogosian's TALK RADIO, a one act play about Barry Champlain, a man on the radio who everybody loves to hate, and hates to love.
The playbill starts off on a sufficiently hostile, jarring note:
Eric Bogosian has got a big mouth and an even bigger ego.
There must be a story behind that; but that’s what the playbill says, and we’ll buy it. Bogosian’s Talk Radio, presented by the Gangbusters Theatre Company, hasn’t been performed in LA in nine years. One suspects there’s not only big ego on Eric; one suspects healthy ego on producer/director Leon Shanglebee too, as this production drips cockiness, from the announcements to the concluding program note of special thanks: “help more next time and maybe we’ll remember you!” Humility is nowhere to be found on the premises.
Which is part character bluster, and part irony, because Bogosian’s play isn’t really all that great, yet this company makes it as good as it can be. The script is more entertaining than studied—you can’t help but thinking that almost any 80 minutes of actual talk radio would be at least as enthralling—and it merely flirts with drama without sustaining it. Even a big cathartic speech by the protagonist at the end is trivialized, and nothing much ends up said in it or in the play itself at all. The lights go down, then they perk up; it’s hot and heavy, life and death on the air, but it’s also time for pizza and taking bets on whether a caller may or may not be pregnant; drama might emerge for a moment, but then it’s time for a new host, and talk radio goes on like a slow, muddy river, not like a thunderclap.
There’s not a lot of narrative or sustained drama in Talk Radio only stabs at both here and there. Yet there’s not a lot of stasis either; the direction keeps everyone moving, keeps sideshows emerging, keeps bit actors engaged. These lead down dead-ends, however, and while disjunct fragments may be true to the medium, in a play that is neither Aristotelean nor Brechtian it is at times difficult to see why we shouldn’t simply be listening to the real stuff.
Give abundant credit, though, to the direction and the players, who make it not just watchable but highly entertaining; especially give it to the show’s star, Christian Levatino, who as Bogosian’s indefatigably insufferable talk host Barry Champlain cuts the role apart and dices it into a rich roux of smartass angularity, tough-guy wincing, and conversational thuggery.
Champlain doesn’t talk to callers as much as mug them, pulling the rug over and over at just the point at which they think they’ve bought some confidence; Levantino adds to the script a copious amount of engaging masochism. We can see through his performance far more than from the script itself why listeners keep going back to get beat up over and over. He booms authority over the airwaves even while winking at reason; with his on-air ironies and off-mike energy, he’s a bad boy you keep wanting to give another chance to.
Such an ego can’t have much more of a love interest beyond what’s in the mirror, and Mary Kelsey as Linda MacArthur provides the not-much-of one. Ms. Kelsey gives her busy but quiet role both demur and bluster—she is fabulous at acting awestruck, even nervous when talking about Champlain.
The set is cool, and the staging almost sumptuous, complete with a reverse-fishbowl picture window framing the occasional comic antic. But we never really feel any tension in the script. Tension is grafted on, like a third limb: this show is going to “go national” in twenty-four hours—will Barry blow it?
We don’t care enough; there’s nothing to root for. The script is agressive but as hollow as the callers, who themselves are more caricatures than characters.
Recently applied appraisals of the play being “prescient” or a statement on corporate media conditions today seem quite a bit a stretch. But as character study, Talk Radio takes all prizes; bloggers especially, who have more in common with talk radio hosts than they might like to admit, would do very well to take a peek.
Review from the LA WEEKLY by Amy Nicholson on March 27, 2006
*GO*
TALK RADIO
“You’re a prick in the conscience of the country,”
chirps a caller to shock jock Barry Champlain (Christian Levatino). Insult? Maybe — not that Barry would mind. He’s spent the last decade-plus fielding the irate, the lonely, the rambling masses yearning to break free on his regionally popular, anything-goes daily talk show. And tomorrow, his caustic, literate, King Solomon-with-a-brewski act (one minute, he’s sounding off on the economy and the Indians; the next, telling a teary pregnant teen that, hey, it took two to tango) goes national. Which is a silver cloud with a very black lining, as more listeners means more suits wringing their hands over Barry’s knee-jerk inability to make nice, and his character-assassin’s eye for the sourness in everyone. Eric Bogosian’s 1987 one-act (here confidently staged by Leon Shanglebee and his very fine ensemble) has the longevity and resonance of Sidney Lumet’s Network, and shares its ominous curiosity about media control, desperate exhibitionism and the dangerous distraction of fluff — demons that have only gotten stronger in these Dancing With the Stars days. In this incisive production, what lingers beyond Barry’s frustration is Bogosian’s whisper that the public can’t even place hope in our straight-talking iconoclasts, who themselves may have been commissioned and sculpted by hucksters looking to make a buck.
Review from BACKSTAGE WEST by Terri Roberts on March 23, 2006
There are a lot of bored, unhappy people living very small lives in 1987 Cleveland, Ohio, and they all want to talk—to Barry Champlain. This obviously intelligent, enormously egocentric, envelope-pushing provocateur with the invented name and the exaggerated life is the host of a groundbreaking late-night talk show on a local radio station—a show that is just 24 hours away from making the big leap into national syndication. And because all the sponsors are listening that evening, Champlain's executive producer, Dan Woodruff (Bart Petty), needs this show to be especially memorable.
In Eric Bogosian's aggressive and stimulating play, Dan eventually gets his wish, though not in the way he envisioned. Champlain's laser-sharp arsenal includes unbridled sarcasm, righteous indignation, and blind fury at the pure stupidity and banality of his fellow man. And on this night, it seems every idiot from this and every other nearby village is calling to talk about absolutely nothing. That is until one idiot in particular, a doped-up kid named Kent (Matt Mann), calls in and suggests his equally strung-out girlfriend may have OD'ed and he's too fried to know what to do. So, naturally, he phones a call-in radio show.
Champlain could come off as simply an on-air ass with nothing better to do than antagonize an unsuspecting audience—and, fairly often, his staff as well. But under the skilled direction of Leon Shanglebee, the electrifying, can't-take-your-eyes-off-him Christian Levatino makes the incendiary talk show host appealing in his moral outrage, showing us the bristling humanity hidden in the man who wears his intolerance of the ordinary and complacent as a badge of pride.
Bogosian interrupts the flow of the play with flashbacks from Woodruff, techie Stu Noonan (funnyman Jonathan L. Burbridge), and Champlain's show producer–occasional bedmate Linda MacArthur (Mary Kelsey), remembering how they met Champlain and eventually came together at this station on this show (nicely detailed studio design by Danny Cistone). Though the flashbacks are jarring, we gain insight into his off-air life and his transformation from average joe to the belligerent, frustrated persona he now inhabits.
Solid production designs by Fontaine (lighting) and
Daniel Paul (sound) support the excellence of this
production.
Review from ACCESSIBLY LIVE OFF-LINE by Rich Borowy on March 13, 2006.
The Gangbusters Theatre Company presents Eric Bogosian's TALK RADIO, a one act play about Barry Champlain, a man on the radio who everybody loves to hate, and hates to love.
Taking place within a small AM radio station in Cleveland, smack dab in the heart of America's rust belt is Barry Champlain (Christian Levatino). He's a hard-ass dude of the air, and speaks his mind with the people he talks to on the radio. He doesn't pull any punches when it comes to the world around him, as well as the pathetic lives that his callers face themselves in. But Barry's show will become nationwind within 24 hours. His producer Dan Woodruff (Bart Perry) becomes concerned at first, but the more Barry rambles on, the better he gets. Of course, when Dan "discovered" him a few years before, he was just a DJ that was tired of putting out lame radio, so a persona was created.
That's not cheating the public. In fact, it's giving them what they want: an anti-hero of the airwaves, and it's Barry all the way to keep others in order!
Eric's play, written in 1987, was created at a time when radio, especially AM radio, was going through drastic changes. Music was being phased out in droves, now fleeing for the FM band. Stereo AM wasn't catching on, so in order for AM stations to become competitive, they had to bring on talent that would be talked about by its public, even if these "air personalities" had to push things a bit over the top!
Levatino as Barry is the ultimate radical talk guy! He could gab himself out from one situation to another and still come out on top! And a special note is Jonathan L. Burbridge as Barry's co-producer Stu Noonan, who plays a once-hip-now-burned-out Barry wannabe, making sure that the calls he screens are "juicy" ones for Barry to pick at and pick on.
The rest of the cast include Scott Sobel, Rob Saunders, Daniel Paul, Mark Kelsey, Matt Man, Sierra Fisk, Matthew Heron, Mancini Graves, Missy Heron, Heidi Huber, Trent Hopkins, and Jamie Jones.
Directed by Leon Shanglebee, TALK RADIO, now pushing twenty years, is just as timely today as it was way back then. Though many of the nation's problems and situations may have different names and places, the concerns of America still remain. Since then, radio has gone from bad to worse. Today, thanks to everything from FCC deregulations, "political correctness", and the ever loving do-it-yourself "podcasting" via the 'net, talk radio is getting blander by each year. Stations program the same talk show host over hundreds of affiliates at the same time all run under the same management, while others, the once listeners and callers, can create their own shows with a few simple pieces of equipment on a broadband internet connection. Radio needs more folks like Barry Champlain to keep everybody in line, including the mega companies that own and control the airwaves!
(Come back home Howard! All is forgiven! Honest!)
PRESS RELEASE FOR TALK RADIO
Before there was Howard Stern, before there was Rush Limbaugh, before there was Tom Leykis, before there was Mike Malloy, there was….Barry Champlain, the fictional protagonist of Eric Bogosian’s 1987 play “Talk Radio.” Bogosian himself starred as the angry, funny, seductive Greek American talk show host at a pioneering all-talk format Cleveland radio station.
Now, Gangbusters Theatre Company revives the work. The Gangbusters are fresh with the glow of having just received two L.A. Weekly Award
nominations: one for outstanding revival (“Balm in
Gilead”) and one for supporting actor Christian Levatino. Levatino plays Champlain in the new production of “Talk Radio.”
Levatino is reunited with director Leon Shanglebee, who guided him through the Gangbusters productions of “Balm in Gilead” and “Streamers.”
The Gangbusters motto is “staging the modern classics with their original speed and violence.” Unlike “Streamers” and “Balm in Gilead,”
“Talk Radio” does not contain physical violence. In fact, it’s a dark comedy. The speed and violence are all in the language.
The Gangbusters’ other hallmark is the best ensemble work in town.
The action depicted on “Talk Radio” occurs just as Champlain’s show is set to convert from local broadcast to national syndication. Champlain is a guy on the edge, smart but slightly unhinged, pushed in that direction by his own massive ego and by the numerous callers whose lives are either completely banal, or so desperate so as to make the lives that Thoreau wrote about seem like oceans of tranquility.
The abrasive Barry is not above pushing their buttons and working them into frenzies, all in the name of good radio.
Champlain has a support network on the job, consisting of Dan, his executive producer (the station guy); his techies Stu and Spike; and his show producer and occasional lover, Linda.
One caller, a kid who makes his way to the station, claims that his girlfriend has overdosed on drugs. Barry, himself a master manipulator, is not taken in by the kid.
The very entertaining “Talk Radio” is not so much plot-driven as it is an observation and commentary not just on the kind of personality that would become a national talk show host, but also a scrutiny of the kinds of individuals who would take moments of their lives to call in to such a radio show.
The play “Talk Radio” is significantly different from Bogosian’s movie of the same title. The movie was an amalgam of the play, plus life events and a book about murdered talk show host Alan Berg. If you’ve seen the movie, you haven’t seen the play.
As stated earlier, the play “Talk Radio” is a dark comedy. Nobody dies.
In addition to Levatino, Shanglebee’s cast includes Jonathan L. Burbridge, Erin Cummings, Sierra Fisk, Mancini Graves , Missy Hairston, Matthew Heron, Heidi Huber, Trent Hopkins, Jaime Jones, Mary Kelsey, Matt Mann, Daniel Paul, Bart Petty, Rob Saunders and Scott Sobel.
Associate producer: Matthew Heron.
Assistant director: Mancini Graves. Lighting design:
Fontaine. Sound design: Mike Flowers. Production
design: Keith Disciullo.