RADIO ACTION THEATER
Radio Action Theater, based in New York City and produced by Alabama writer and director Robert Clem, was broadcast on public radio in the U.S. and abroad from 1993 to 1998. The episodes feature performances by Eli Wallach, Ossie Davis, Betty Buckley, Stacy Keach, Jeffery Wright, David Strathairn, Hope Davis, John Glover, Lois Smith, Campbell Scott, Will Patton and Michael O'Keefe, and are based on Southern literature and Southern and U.S. history, with adapted stories by William Faulkner, Charles Chesnutt and William Gilmore Simms; and history plays based on the Hamilton-Burr duel, Woodrow Wilson's curious rise to power and the deadly expedition of Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto through what is now the American South. Each episode was directed by Robert Clem with original music composed and performed by Donald Stark.
RADIO ACTION THEATER
DAVE'S NECKLISS -- Ossie Davis in a story by Charles Chesnutt
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Robert Clem, Director
- Charles Chesnutt was a pioneering African-American author who wrote a number of novels about middle class and professional blacks but found that white readers wanted only to hear about black characters from the lower strata, who spoke in dialects reminiscent of slavery. White author Joel Chandler Harris had created in Uncle Remus a kindly black man who looked back fondly on his slavery days. In The Conjure Woman, his best known work, Chesnutt created the character of Uncle Julius, who was wily enough to be deferential to the well to do but told told tales in which there was no trace of nostalgia for the brutalities of slavery. Produced for public radio in the late 1996, the program features scholars from Yale, Rutgers and North Carolina State about Chesnutt's legacy, and features a dramatization of Chesnutt's conjure story "Dave's Neckliss." The cast features:
- Ossie Davis as Uncle Julius
- W.T. Martin as the plantation owner
- Welker White as the owner's wife
Music composed and performed by Donald Stark
Produced, adapted and directed by Robert Clem