Play a Day: Fairfield

Eric Coble

For Monday I read Fairfield by Eric Coble, and available at New Play Exchange.

Two months reading a new play every day, and this is the first time I have presented the work of Eric Coble which is odd because we are friends. I am friends with playwright Eric Coble. Everyone hear that? Me and Eric Coble. Yes.

We met in college, I was completing my fifth year as an undergrad and he began his MFA in Acting at Ohio University so though I think of him as older we are the same age. He stopped acting in 1996, I was the marketing director at Dobama Theatre when he walked on stage for the very last time in Eric Overmyer's Mi Vida Loca. Coble is an excellent actor and I am sorry no one else has the opportunity to see that.

Because he was committed to becoming a playwright! And he has been most prolific and most successful. I had the great good fortune to perform in The Velocity of Autumn opposite Cleveland legend Dorothy Silver at Beck Center in Lakewood, before it moved to the Arena Stage and then Broadway, a production for which Estelle Parson was nominated for a Tony.

The Velocity of Autumn
(Beck Center, 2012)

I am dropping all the names today.

For ten years Eric and I have been colleagues in the Playwrights' Unit at the Cleveland Play House, where I have been blessed to receive Eric's guidance, advice and good humor as I have made my own journey as a professional writer.

I have also had the fortune to experience several of his works in progress, including Fairfield, as well as seeing the CPH premiere production in 2015. In the spirit of #NewDayNewPlay, however, I did re-read it before writing my recommendation!

Fairfield takes place in an inner-ring suburb somewhere in the United States. Except the only city like this one in the United States in Cleveland Heights, a magical fantasyland where an almost equal number of white people and black people (and a not insignificant number of Jewish people) live side-by-side and get into heated arguments about race and racism and yet never actually set fire to anything and we don't leave because we love it here. Except for all the racism.

Fairfield
(Cleveland Play House, 2015)

Eric was a member of our school board when he wrote this play (we both live in Cleveland Heights, the city of great writers) and after the table read I asked if he wasn't concerned about how it might be received. He just gave that carefree smile of his and told me he wasn't running for reelection, anyway.

Coble has an incomparable way of taking difficult contemporary issues to outrageously hilarious extremes, and Fairfield is a classic example of this. He explodes modern conversations about race, while still presenting engaging and (with one obvious exception) sympathetic, well-meaning, occasionally delusional characters who truly want to do the right thing, even if they only help make everything spin more wildly out of control.

As one of the parents whose children attend Fairfield might say, Eric Coble knows how to "use his words."

This month I have been heartened to read thirty great works by thirty tremendous playwrights. So many of them were recommended to me by other playwrights, dedicated individuals who proudly promote each other's work.

I am taking a short break from writing, however, as I concentrate on an outdoor, summer production of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. Perhaps I will see you there!

Eric Coble is currently developing his new play, "The Girl Who Swallowed a Cactus" at the New Visions/New Voices Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Red Onion, White Garlic: First Reading

Red onion, white garlic & cookies.

Last night my new work, Red Onion, White Garlic, was read for the Playwrights’ Unit and several guests. It was a great thrill to hear the words, and a joy to hear the assembled laugh and react to it.

The work is a commission by Talespinner Children’s Theatre, it opens April 8 at Reinberger Auditorium. This is my third work for TCT, though the first two were ideas I brought to the company. For the 2017 season, Ali Garrigan, the artistic director, suggested I look into Indonesian folklore.

As you often discover when researching folktales, no matter where you look you find many of the same stories. The original Red Onion, White Garlic has elements in common with Cinderella. A wicked woman favors her own daughter, Bawang Merah (Malay for shallot), and not her stepchild, Bawang Putih (Malay for garlic), who is made to do all of the household chores. As in the western tale, the put-upon girl receives a magical boon, and when the jealous stepmother and stepsister attempt to capitalize upon her fortune, they are punished.

Now, this was one of many tales I found (there are, in fact, several wound into my play) but the story as is didn’t make me happy. First off, I already did the “evil stepfather” thing in Rosalynde & The Falcon. And secondly, this idea that the stepparent is mean and unfair, while it may be true in specific circumstances (there are mean people everywhere) it is an ugly stereotype and hardly in keeping with modern society.

What if these stepsisters share a mother, and that they love and care for each other, as siblings do? What would that story be like?

After the reading, the attendants discussed theme and found out just what that story would be like. It would be a story of confidence and teamwork, temperance and balance. Accountability and humility, envy and loss. These are certainly important lessons for our time.

Listeners also tuned into how beautifully the sisters get on with each other, in spite of their having been born a generation apart, and having been raised in such different circumstances. One of the most vivid comments came from Megan, a member of the Case MFA Acting program. She observed that just as many rivers flow into the ocean, there are many ways to raise a child.

Rehearsals begin February 16.

Red Onion, White Garlic at Talespinner Children's Theatre opens April 8, 2017.

Entry Point (2017)

Rehearsal for "Set Fire and Start Again"

New play development is a thing. It is as though almost every theater in town has its own playwrights ensemble or presents some new plays festival. Convergence-Continuum has the NEOMFA Playwright Festival, Ensemble Theatre the Columbi New Plays Festival, Dobama Theatre has a playwrights program called Playwrights’ GYM, and the Play House the Playwrights’ Unit, that last of which I am a member.

Reaching back twenty years, I was an actor for Cleveland Public Theatre’s new play festivals. That event included a prize for best play, the Chilcote Award, which would go on to receive a full production the following season. I was in the world premiere production of Lucy Wang’s Junk Bonds in 1995, and performed in both the festival (1997) and premiere (1998) production of Sarah Morton’s Love In Pieces.

In more recent years, when they produced an annual festival of works-in-progress called Big Box, I was afforded the opportunity to develop my own plays, including solo pieces I Hate This (2003) and And Then You Die (2009) among others. Each had life outside Big Box, but the assistance provided by CPT made them happen.

Of course, there are a wide variety of ways to develop a new script. You can invite friends to your house and read it. You can stage your own public reading, or submit it to a celebration of new works like the Playwrights Local Annual Cleveland Playwrights Festival or attach yourself or gain membership to one of our local theaters’ playwright collectives. You can even declare your script completed and submit it for production, here or anywhere, really. The internet has made it much easier to find companies across the country that actively seek new work.

This year, CPT is trying something new, by producing a trio of events designed to progress dramatic works at various stages of completing. The first stage of these, Entry Point, takes place this weekend. Over the course of two and a half hours, audience members can move between over a half-dozen locations on the CPT campus to witness - and comment upon - new works at various stages of development.

In addition, they are featuring panel discussions on Saturday afternoon. A number of my favorite artists and CPT stalwarts are presenting as part of this project, you can even sit in on a brand new work from Eric Coble. Also, there's free beer.

My friend and colleague Carrie Williams is working on a script titled Set Fire and Start Again, since the beginning of the year she has been directing our company of five to create a script-in-hand, twenty-minute performance of what she calls “fragments” of a larger piece that she’s working toward. I have had a wonderful time working with this crew, a lot of positive energy devoted to developing Carrie’s work, giving her what she needs, we hope, to drive this piece forward.

This is the project I was referring to when describing those of us who go into the cold to create. For some reason my sharpest memories of participating in the creation of someone else's work, generally as an actor, with highlit and marked up new pages in my hand, take place in deepest winter. During the rehearsal process I was standing in the wings, and turned to face the black wall of the Levin Theatre. Painted black, and repainted many times over, how many layers of paint dating back how many years. I touched its surface, which has born witness to so much new work.

When I was a youth, when I was in college, even, I was not interested in new work. My ignorance of the classics placed a premium upon them, they had staying power and pedigree, they had been endorsed by time and I assumed therefore those were “real” plays. And I considered myself a writer!

Since that time I have come to an entirely different conclusion. New writing is the lifeblood of civilization, and that working as a collaborator (even as an actor! yes!) in the pursuit of original plays is vital to the progress of culture. The open, creative exchange of ideas in a public venue. You like movies? You like TV? It all begins with the basic, local act of crafting the words to be spoken from one person to another, on a stage, before an audience. That is the basis of understanding.

Entry Point will be presented at Cleveland Public Theatre, January 20-22, 2017.

The Crucible: Archive Materials

Diane Bell as Mary Warren, Kirk Willis as John Proctor
Cleveland Play House archives (CWRU)

In honor of the Cleveland Play House 100^th Season, the Playwrights Unit has been asked to write short plays about the company’s history. As CPH’s 2015 production of The Crucible will be in performance when these sketches will be presented, I offered to cover the regional premiere of that play, which was produced at the Play House in 1954.

We were given access to company archives, which are kept at Case Western Reserve University, and their staff and the apprentices at CPH have been extremely helpful in locating and distributing specific items.

I have previously covered The Crucible in this blog, having read contemporary reviews of the CPH ’54 production, as well as Miller’s own inspiration for having written it. But there was much I had never seen, including photographic images of the actors, their costumes, and the scenic design.

Produced at the Euclid-77^th Street Space, it was presented on a wide, open thrust stage, with little wing space. The set is a spare frame construction. The period costumes, inspired by the garb of 17^th century Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay colony, do much of the work in placing this production in time and space.

The reviews for the CPH production were uniformly positive; when they were critical, it was generally in comparing this new play to Miller’s landmark Death of a Salesman.  A preview piece written by William F. McDermott for the Plain Dealer provided background which informed potential audiences this new work (it opened on Broadway in 1953) had elicited a wide range of opinion.

The Crucible at the Euclid-77th Street Theatre
Cleveland Play House archives (CWRU)

True, The Crucible had won the Tony Award for Best New Play. However, the producers did not decide to create a touring production. McDermott reported that the West German paper Der Tag found the work, “too narrow minded in clinging to historical fact,” and that in Miller’s characters he had created, “no one person which stirs our conscience.”

When the Munich-based paper Abend suggested this play is a “reliable image of what happens in the United States,” it even produced a defensive response from the playwright who countered, “In Salem they only hung [sic] sixteen persons, in Europe they had burned thousands.”

One of the great delights of looking into an archive like this are the pieces of personal correspondence which someone, at some time, decided it would be worth to save. There were some internal memos, and also personal messages of special interest or gratitude.

A thank you card from a Mrs. S. who lived on Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights saw The Crucible with her husband in 1954 and offered a pair of observations which, taken together, will be familiar to anyone who has managed any theater company, anywhere:

“Neither of us can remember a more wonderful production.”

-- and also –

“I was annoyed to see so many empty seats.”

See also: some thoughts on "The Crucible" at Cleveland Play House (2015)

Cleveland Public Theatre presents THE WITCHES as part of Test Flight, a showcase of new works, March 3, 4 & 5, 2022.

Source:
The Plain Dealer, October 3, 1954
Cleveland Play House Archives, Case Western Reserve University

The Secret Adversary: First Reading

This paperback has been in my satchel for six months.

Historically, I have found it necessary or even desirable to be working on more than one piece at a time. This summer, however, one project in particular has created a distressing logjam, not only for my ability to write but also to think and conduct myself as an emotionally adult human.

During the past two weeks I held a rehearsal read of the work in question, a one-hour adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary, and then presented it to the unit this past Wednesday. Just completing the draft suddenly made it possible for me to think about an entirely other work, one which I began a year and a half ago, and discover what needed to happen next with that script.

In addition, there was another piece, a project we are working on within the unit, a five minute scene, which I was able to create in short order (the turnaround itself was fortuitously brief) and about which I will write in some detail in the days or weeks to come.

The reading at the CPH offices was happily well-attended. It helped that every single GLT actor-teacher was present – all eight of them, most reading and the rest to provide support and enjoy the read. But there were also CPH staff, most of the unit, and several of our kids.

Feedback was reassuring, that I have successfully adapted the novel into a script which flies along and is mostly coherent. RL for example is a great fan of Christie’s characters Tommy and Tuppence and expressed how much she looked forward to the reading (prior) and how much the characters satisfied (after).

In fact there was helpful balance of positive response and critical comment and suggestion to keep me moving forward. The small company (3 men, 2 women) put some in mind of 39 Steps, suggesting the piece is going to be even more humorous in performance then I had previously imagined.

CH stated the transition from what is Christie’s dialogue to what is mine is pretty seamless, and in fact most of the lines which popped for folks were actually mine (or in one glaring case, Evelyn Waugh’s.)

One issue of great interest is the McGuffin, the “draft treaty” which puts the entire adventure into motion. Where it passed hands - on the deck of the sinking Lusitania – requires some explanation to our modern, American audience. Even more important, however, is how such a document could topple a government. I mean, it really doesn’t matter, that’s not why the adventure is exciting. But it does give the entire endeavor some kind of point. Christie didn’t need to explain this, but I do.

Something else I need to do is create a calendar of events. The book takes place over the course of about a month. The way I have abridged it, it’s more like one week, but I’d like specifics.

It’s been a long summer. I remember writing pages in Montréal and in Maine, day after day in Cleveland. I thought I’d never produce a draft, but kept moving, one page after another.

I’m running a marathon in two weeks. Running a marathon is easy. Writing is hard. 

The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition

The other night I presented a reading for the Playwrights Unit, something I have been working on, on and off, all year. At the moment it’s brief, the reading took a little over a half hour, a collection of folk tales adapted for the present time. Not like, say, Thurber’s Fables For Our Time, but actual Grimm’s fairy tales, re-imagined for the present.

Not the most original concept, I’ll grant you. My own discoveries, just fucking with these bizarre stories is what has kept me interested. For Christmas I received a copy of the newly translated first edition of Grimm’s tales … what most of us know as Grimm’s Fairy Tales are actually an edition that the brothers – who were sociologists, not writers – had published after forty years of cultural anthropology and editing. What you might call bowdlerizing.

For example, in the later Rapunzel, she accidentally tells the witch about the Prince’s visits. In the original version, the witch doesn’t know what’s happening until Rapunzel becomes visibly pregnant.

Many of these original drafts make no sense, stuff just happens. Transgressing children get their comeuppance, except when they don’t. Justice is arbitrary. Kind of like life, I guess, but what is the point?

Having several talented actors read the six scenes I have created (to date) was extremely valuable for two main reasons: I was heartened to know how funny the funny parts are, and also how horrible the horrible parts are.

One notable observation was how urban legends are our modern folk tales. There’s really only one lesson: Fear. Fear everything. Fear travel, fear strangers, fear your food, fear your government, fear Bill Cosby.

But folk tales have the same basic message. Reach above your station, you will suffer. Disobey any small part of what your parents tell you, you will get pregnant and die. Actions may arbitrarily be rewarded with treasure of slow, painful, grotesque punishment. Stay home. Keep your head down. Don’t make waves.

The play, such as it is, is currently a jumble. With more stories, it will become more coherent. But even this brief, enjoyable read inspired some challenging discussions. Folks were generally troubled with the scene about rape, as well they should be. But they were debating what it meant, and what is the truth, and while there were some who felt the mood went far-afield from the general sense of silliness that was prevalent in other stories, that just reassured me I was on the right track.

I do not know where that track will lead but I may follow it where it takes me.</metaphor>

The Great Globe Itself: First Reading

Last evening, we had the first reading of my new work, which will be presenting as Great Lakes Theater’s 2015 free, outreach touring play, visiting 27 sites in Cuyahoga, Summit and Lorain Counties.

Tim Keo, James Rankin and Arthur Chu were invited to read the piece, the company will consist of three men, playing a variety of characters from several points in history. I had requested they prepare to read in three different accents, and it was very satisfying to hear the lines spoken that way. We will be engaging a dialect coach, but their advance preparation was greatly, greatly appreciated.

The Playwrights’ Unit generally takes a break during the summer, so I was very to happy to have those who were in town and available attend and provide extremely valuable feedback. Many thanks to Deb, Margaret and Eric C., and to Lisa and Emily for their assistance and comments.

Working from the assumption that people 1) like to know how things work 2) dig insider information and 3) like to get teased, allow me to present ...

General notes on a play you don’t know nothing about yet:

• The players come and go. The Globe remains.
• It takes an American to get things done.
• The creation of plays always incorporates the story of those who created it.

• Art is inextricable from business and politics.
• The Globe Theatre moves through time and space.
• More than any other theater building in history, this theater has an inalterable connection to its playwright.
• In a weird way, theater has always been made by the same kind of people.

Red flags:

• What are the rules of interaction between people from the past to those in the present.
• What are the politics of the First Globe?
• What is the conflict in the Third Globe?
• This will be an exciting, humorous and enjoyable show to experience, but I personally don't describe what it's about very well.

Notes:

• Cut the floating vial of poison (see rules of interaction.)
• Make it clear that the speech will bring controversy onto its speaker.
• “Am I going to destroy my reputation?” Make explicit.
• Revise the opening verses, add detailed stage directions.
• Expand the stage directions, in general, for the company to clearly understand what’s happening. You can cut them later.
• Abbreviate the Dr. Who business.

Finally:

• 
All of David Hansen's plays are the same play. This is not the first time I have heard this.

This Is The Times!

The improv comedy troupe "The Times" circa 1955.
Clockwise from left: Barney Silver, Danny Michaels, Desmond Brown, Julia Baker.*

In January of this year I presented what was then the one act play Centennial! to the Playwrights' Unit. It is now the first act of a play tentatively called Cleveland Centennial which includes a revised and expanded version of This Is The Times as the second act.

Times began as a potential outreach tour script, one which dealt with the effect of the House Committee on Un-American Activities on ordinary citizens, with an emphasis on those in "show biz." A very early version was presented as a staged reading in late 2008. It included a great deal of verbatim text from HUAC testimony celebrities such as Peter Seeger, Judy Holliday, Paul Robeson and Arthur Miller, but what tied it together was this troupe of Cleveland-area performers.

Dropping the House Committee testimony brought the bare-boned story of The Times down to about forty minutes. Fleshing out that tale has represented my work of late, and tying the two pieces together. Begging the Unit's patience, we read the first act, which they had already heard in a similar version, and the new second act.

It came as a great relief to me that this earlier piece, The Times, was received more or less with satisfaction. GH stated flatly that he felt Times was its own complete play, which did not require the "backstory" of Centennial. That's good, and directs me to concentrate now on Centennial, to make it its own play, worthy of standing alone.

Two stand alone plays, different styles of performance, with a common thread.

I was asked the big questions, the basic questions. What is the question asked at the beginning of Centennial that must be answered? Where is the seed that is planted in the first act that grows to fruition in the second? To put it another way, where is Chekhov's gun and when does it go off? I can answer these questions. Oh yes, I can. And I will finish it before 2012.

"Whatever the idea behind the Living Newspaper in the beginning, circumstance and influence of one kind or another have modified it. A literally rough estimate of it at the moment would be: 'Combine the newspaper and the theatre and to hell with both traditions.' In the beginning we thought we would dramatize current news, it never occurring to us at the moment that the current news at hand was likely to be very weak stuff." - Morris Watson, 1936

TKT pointed out the difference in tone reader LJH took in performing the character of The Voice of the Living Newspaper. She was, as I had requested, like a big, bold, sassy headline with most of her delivery, but then there are places where she interacts with "citizens" and there is much more interesting, with character. LHJ herself suggested that the Voice might take a more active role in showing people (the audience) around, if the point is to showcase Cleveland. I feel at this point this piece is too stagey where it should have more attitude, just as it strives to be too deep where it should be handled with a lighter touch.

Who is the main character? If it is Cleveland itself, who will care? MO said the history stuff was just boring ("I don't care about the shit I can Google.") that he sat through waiting for the stuff that's about people. With the Voice as a real person, history could become character stuff.

I need to revisit the character of Avery Brundage. He's such an ass.

It came as a relief to hear BP point up that the political business does have contemporary resonance. What was surprising to me, before the reading, was how much was biting in 2010 which seems dated only one year later.

There's a lot of work, but it's not the 'drop everything and start again' kind of work. I've got it. I can see it. I will get it there.

*Actually Mark Cipra, Daniel McElhnaney, Darius Stubbs and Elizabeth Wood, in December 2008.

Commitment

This evening the Cleveland Play House Playwrights' Unit met for our annual pizza party kick-off, where we all hunker down with our calendars and decide when best to meet. And eat pizza. And in my case, drink.

The relocation to the Allen Theatre has given us the opportunity to rethink to goals, or at least the methods, of the Unit. We meet (more or less) every other week to share pages and critique each others' work. Emphasis this year, however, has been placed on readings of completed works. To that end, Laura gently pressed us to fill the calendar for the remainder of 2011 with weekly Monday night readings.

And so I jumped. I will finish my latest piece by the beginning of December. Why not? I work best with deadlines. Besides, I have found my work on the 1950s to be flagging, and have just been waiting for the year to end to concentrate on the 70s.

Well, fuck that noise. Time to get into the big ugly. Welcome to America's Bicentennial.

Further reflection

More on the first reading:

ES: More fun to play with the ironies of what we already know … I was trying to avoid this (see: RED) but I can’t help myself, too much commentary has slipped in. And people enjoy them.

The Torso Murders … I did not ask for clarity on this, but I am afraid I have not been clear. My theory has been replaced by another serial killer. I need to make that crystal.

It takes a long time to “get into” the play because we do not know who we are following. Bernard needs to emerge earlier as a focus.

ML: The first scene has an awful lot of slang, which makes what is already a scene which is challenging to follow almost impossible to follow.

KM: REALLY loves the Valediction. So I got that right. I need to make sure where he is and what is going on is also crystal. Some got the final line - and some totally misunderstood it, and that is my responsibility.

First Reading

Shared the first draft of Centennial with the Playwrights' Unit this evening. This is a play which, after conducting non-stop research for four weeks, both here and in New York, I did not know how to begin. And there it is. Yay oh me.

I was delighted to share all of my really young GLTF actor-teacher friends with the Unit, as they read all the parts. In my wildest fantasies, it really is playable with eight actors. We will see about that. I commend Debbie, Bobby and Kristy for jumping in with no rehearsal what so ever -- can I send a special shout-out to Debbie for delightfully playing the eterenally upbeat Voice of the Living Newspaper! Also on hand were (in alphabetical order) Annie, Brian, Carrie, Nathan, Steven and Tim. Especially Annie, who was given the responsibility to sing a capella before the play had even really started.

So, where am I? In a good, good place. Really good. Is there work to be done, to be sure. But I didn’t even know where the hell I was, and that has changed. I know where I am, and hopefully where I am going.

DM made a very simply, and helpful point. The first third is a "valentine" to Cleveland, the second third dense with politics (which left her a bit sleepy) and the final third all about Bernard. This is good to know. TKT does not agree, exactly, but that does not mean it is not a helpful observation.

There were difficulties in following certain physical gags, especially anything involving the appearance of both Sam and Bernard in the same scene. I got that, I can clear that up.

TKT also pointed up how the relationship between Bernard and Johnny is implied submerged, glancing. Where the emotional weight of this relationship, what is at stake? That can be improved by a re-written opening scene. I am planning on trashing most of what is said there for something stronger.

In what way, stronger? Well, as EC pointed up, the journey of Eliot Ness, from young hotshot to troubled husband and cop is very clear, whereas Bernard’s journey from schlep to player is not. That needs to be obvious in that first scene.

There is a great deal of cutting necessary in the verbatim text, especially the political rhetoric. I have already cut a great deal there. And I can cut so much more. And I am looking forward to it.

The history, especailly the theater history went over big. I have played with the historical record a little to tell a good story, and I need to do this more.


Certain turns of phrase made me happy. LK loved the line, “You can’t eat gold medals” (Jesse Owens actually said that.) AH was made aware of Cleveland as a former major player, and she said it made her feel proud. KM said it told a great story about what it means to be an American. BM said it shows not much in America has changed since then.

There is so much more I could share, and I will. DM promised me a list of places where people explain too much. I am looking forward to that. It is all part of an extremely helpful process. I love not being alone.

Radio Priest (book)

I think I have some kind of stomach virus. I have been up since 4 am with a roiling stomach, which was not alleviated by choosing to take this time to finish reading Donald Warren's biography of Charles Coughlin, Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, The Father of Hate Radio.

The book refers to Coughlin as a "footnote" in American history, but I am coming to believe he is more of a blind-spot. There are two Jewish members of a certain age in the Playwrights' Unit, and when I brought in a scene making passing reference to this radio priest, one of my peers needed me to explain who he was, while the other was all too aware of his history.

Warren's book details the interesting life of this narcissistic and hateful Catholic priest, though I have to admit I was more interested in the earlier, pre-WWII history, after which it gets bogged down in the question of whether or not Coughlin received direct monetary compensation from the Nazis. This is not unimportant information, but there were an awful lot of names and unanswered questions and a great many specious claims as to make the author sound almost as conspiratorily-minded as his subject.

Published in the mid 1990s, Radio Priest attempts at the outset to trace Coughlin's brand of right-wing, bellicose wailing to the then-present day polititainers like Rush Limbaugh. The book is well-overdue for a reprint with a new forward.

Anything clever I might say comparing Father Coughlin to the likes of Glenn Beck was already done in a much more professional manner in the September 13 issue of The Onion in the article Nation Once Again Comes Under Sway Of Pink-Faced Half-Wit:

Dr. David Snider, a media historian and author of the book "Frothing, Shouting Dim-Bulbs: An American Tradition", said that the current porcine loudmouth is the latest in a long line of pink-faced half-wits that began in the 1930s with the incendiary radio broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin, a pink-faced half-wit Roman Catholic priest.

According to Snider, this original pink-faced half-wit exploited the Great Depression to foment his message of virulent anti-Semitism—a tactic of shamelessly preying upon American misery and misfortune that has since been employed by nearly every pink-faced, intellectually corrupt piece of shit asshole to open his fat, disgusting pig mouth since.

Radio Priest opened my eyes to the finer points of anti-Semitism, and the more recent defense of anti-Semitism practiced by those who hold it dear, namely blaming only bad Jews for all the evil which befalls the rest of us - good Christians and good Jews alike.

The good Father taught us that in the olden days, because of true anti-Semitism, Jews could not own land, nor were they tolerated to stay anywhere for any length of time. As a result, Jews put all of their savings into GOLD, which they carried from place to place. And they learned to create more gold by lending gold for interest - an act, children repeat after me, call usury - something Christians were forbidden to practice because it goes against God's law (see: Shakespeare's: The Merchant of Venice.)

Flash-forward to the 20th Century, or at least to 1936 which concerns us most, and Coughlin has made it clear that what threatens our world the most is the Jew-backed, Communist world conspiracy, made possible by "international financiers" - this being the term Coughlin more commonly used early in his career before coming right out and saying "Jews".

The year 1936 was the high point in Coughlin's political career. And remember, we are talking about a parish priest from Detroit. He supposedly answers to the Catholic Church, and Warren's book is loaded with documented missives and direct quotations from interviews detailing the back and forth between bishops, cardinals, federal agents and the like, describing the thoughts of Church superiors and how they might deal with a person who had gained an historically unprecedented amount of influence and power due strictly to the power of mass media - the radio.

The story ends with a whimper, not a bang. Warren would have us outraged that the Catholic Church did very little to reign in a figure who increasingly (especially after his own party's humbling in the 1936 Presidential election) hateful rhetoric led directly or indirectly to hate crimes and which was arguably "lending aid and comfort to our enemies" during the war with Germany. Since his book has been published, accounts of child abuse by priests too numerous to tally left this reader unsurprised at the Church's inaction.

Now, if I may offer my own opinion: What is distressing to me is no longer that individuals such as Coughlin can miseducate so many people. It is the extent to which so many people actually prefer to think in a paranoid and fearful manner. It is the only explanation. Just recently Glenn Beck dedicated three hours to bête noire of the right, George Soros. Granted, Beck was doing a hatchet job on a single individual, not an entire race, but he did attempt to distance himself from accusations of anti-Semitism by - ta-dah! - accusing the Jew Soros of being anti-Semitic.

Remember what the good Father taught us - Jews are not the enemy, Bad Jews are the enemy. An important distinction. Let us continue. From The New Yorker, November 29, 2010:

Beck pictured Soros as a deeply evil figure, a shadowy manipulator whose marionettes include unions, the Democratic Party, the media, and the President; a rapacious financier who seeks to subvert and destroy the American republic in order to satisfy his own greed for money and advance his plot to establish an all-powerful global, state under his control. As it happens, these tropes correspond uncannily to those of classical anti-Semitism.

I happened to read this article the same morning I finished Warren's book. Hmn.

Unlike Beck, who has the support of his Gentile oligarch Rupert Murdoch, Coughlin relied on independent radio stations which became increasingly unhappy with his rhetoric to carry his message across the country and his radio broadcasts were suppressed by the late 1930s, and with is a major source of his revenue. Around the same time, however, his weekly paper Social Justice gained a higher-quality look, which different color inks to make it pop and higher quality photographs. There is evidence that this funding came straight from Berlin. It is without a doubt that several articles in the paper were direct transcriptions of speeches from the office of Joseph Goebbels. Eventually he was pressured to cease publication as a case was being created against him as a disseminator of seditious materials.

Source:
Radio Priest, Charles Coughlin, the Father of Hate Radio
The Onion
The New Yorker