Columbia Workshop
How It Came to Exist
The Columbia Workshop didn't arrive as a polished product. It arrived as a question — what could radio do if nobody tried to sell anything? When the series premiered on CBS on July 18, 1936, it carried no sponsor and no commercial obligations. The network had deliberately withheld the timeslot from sale, which meant the people making the show were free to break things. That freedom, unusual for American broadcasting then or since, is where everything interesting about the Workshop begins.
The driving force behind the launch was Irving Reis, a former motion picture photographer and control engineer who had been lobbying CBS for exactly this kind of series for months. His break came when William B. Lewis arrived at the network and wrote the Workshop into the schedule. Erik Barnouw, in his book The Golden Web, described Lewis as someone who "had little originality, but he quickly recognized it in others, and he set them going." That's a fair description of the institutional machinery that made the Workshop possible: a man with vision lobbying upward until he found someone willing to let him try.
Reis was born in New York City on May 7, 1906, and educated at Columbia University. He had already written three radio plays — St. Louis Blues, The Half-Pint Flask, and Meridian 7-1212 — and when Lewis gave him the Workshop, he also gave him the director's chair. The premiere itself was ragged. Reis crammed two one-act plays, Comedy of Danger and Finger of God, into a single thirty minutes, and the result felt rushed and unsatisfying. But the second broadcast, Broadway Evening, written by Leopold Proser, was something different. CBS executive Douglas Coulter, who later wrote about the show in a book called Columbia Workshop Plays, called it "really sounding the keynote of the Workshop" — a cascade of audio impressions following a stroll up Broadway from 42nd Street to Central Park, catching crowd noise, subways, pitchmen, barkers, sirens, and street brawls. The third show, Cartwheel, pushed compression to an extreme: nine actors playing thirty-four characterizations across twenty-two scenes in thirty minutes. The Workshop was already declaring what it intended to be.
The show had two formal predecessors at CBS — the Columbia Experimental Laboratory (1931) and the Columbia Experimental Dramatic Laboratory (1932) — and a broader institutional purpose that Coulter stated plainly: when the Workshop opened, there was no show on the air without many limitations, taboos, and sacred cows, and the Workshop would experiment with new ideas, new writers, and new techniques.
The Craft Behind the Sound
The Columbia Workshop's reputation as a writer's theater was real, but the writing was only half the story. The technical experimentation happening behind the glass was just as central to what made the show matter, and the two things fed each other constantly.
Directors and technicians worked with oscillators, electric filters, and echo chambers. New parabolic microphones, as Newsweek described them, could pick voices out of crowds "as a spotlight picks out faces." Electronic filters — small boxes that stripped upper or lower tones from a microphone circuit — could simulate the flattened quality of a telephone voice, a technique so useful it became a standard radio production tool after the Workshop's experiments with it. Walter Pierson, head of the CBS sound department, was challenged to create "the footsteps of the gods" for one Workshop play and "the sounds of fog" for another. Director Earle McGill, who authored a book called Radio Directing, catalogued the CBS sound-effects library across thirteen pages of small type, with four additional pages listing manual effects and devices. The Workshop's early episodes included straight demonstrations of what these tools could do: a sound demonstration aired October 10, 1936; a radio music demonstration followed November 7; a two-part look inside the control booth mixer aired January 9 and 16, 1937.
Bernard Herrmann joined CBS Radio as a staff conductor in 1934, and within two years had been appointed music director of the Columbia Workshop. His formal appointment came after his second program, Rhythm of the Jute Mill, broadcast December 12, 1936. His score for the Workshop's production of The Devil and Daniel Webster, which aired August 6, 1938, demonstrated what the music-sound marriage could achieve: his "ride music," combined with horses' hoofbeats and a cracking whip, put Webster's carriage racing to Jabez's farm into under a minute of radio time that felt physical. Herrmann also used a Workshop broadcast in 1938 to draw a distinction on air between "melodrama" and "melodram" — the latter term describing works that combine narrator and full orchestra, a form the Workshop was actively developing. That relationship with Herrmann led directly to his work with Orson Welles on Mercury Theatre on the Air and ultimately to his debut scoring Citizen Kane.
The Workshop also staged formal adaptations using music in place of conventional sound: a two-part presentation of Alice in Wonderland, scored by Paul Sterrett and Leith Stevens, used music to stand in for all sound effects. Marc Blitzstein contributed a half-hour musical called I've Got the Tune, which attempted to convey long-distance travel and sound effects through purely musical means. The Workshop treated these experiments as legitimate research, not novelty — and McGill cautioned publicly that the goal was never noise for its own sake: "a microphone cannot create the whole picture of life," he wrote, and pushing its boundaries beyond natural limits leads to folly.
The Fall of the City and What It Opened
The single most significant thing the Columbia Workshop produced was The Fall of the City, which aired April 11, 1937. It was the first American verse play written specifically for radio, and its production was an event large enough to require its own logistics. Archibald MacLeish — a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who would later serve as Librarian of Congress — had submitted the play in response to a general invitation for experimental works, and he later wrote in his foreword that radio's audience was "infinitely greater" than poetry's, arguing that the medium could give his poems a public dimension that pages never could.
The setting was an unnamed city square that suggested both antiquity and a hereafter. MacLeish acknowledged being inspired by the Anschluss — Hitler's annexation of Austria — when writing it, and the play functioned as an allegory about populations who surrender their freedom to an authoritarian conqueror. The broadcast required four directors: William N. Robson managed the crowd, Brewster Morgan directed the cast, Earle McGill handled sound effects, and Irving Reis provided overall direction and synchronization. The production moved out of a studio entirely and into the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York for the acoustics, using 200 students from City College of New York as a real mob crowd. McGill discovered during preparation that recordings of a crowd played under a live crowd created the effect of a much larger mob. An isolation booth was constructed for Orson Welles — then twenty-one years old and largely unknown — giving his narrating voice a detached intimacy against the crowd noise beneath it. Burgess Meredith played the pacifist; Edgar Stehli, the priest. Bernard Herrmann composed and conducted the score.
The day of the broadcast brought complications that could have killed the whole enterprise: tennis players arrived claiming they had booked the Armory for a game, and the National Guard showed up just before air time for its regular Sunday maneuvers. The play aired anyway, promptly at 7 p.m. CBS concluded that MacLeish's words were heard by over a million people that evening. CBS CEO William S. Paley said it "was a sensation, which helped point the way to what radio could achieve." Time magazine's review concluded that the broadcast proved "radio, which conveys only sound, is science's gift to poetry and poetic drama" and that "artistically radio is ready to come of age." Newsweek observed, in the broadcast's wake, that there was now an understanding "that radio drama, in both the writing and presentation, was something radically different from drama of the stage and screen." The Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Board later recognized the April 11, 1937 broadcast as a historically significant recording. Critic Randall Jarrell later noted that the play "foretold the fate of Vienna by eleven months" — and the subsequent falls of Prague, Warsaw, Oslo, Amsterdam, and Paris kept lending it new relevance.
MacLeish wrote a second radio play for the Workshop, Air Raid, which aired October 27, 1938, and was described as a technically intricate antiwar statement in verse. CBS took the unusual step of also broadcasting the dress rehearsal on October 26. The play was acclaimed as loudly as The Fall of the City. In 1957, the CBS Radio Workshop remade it — updating jets for planes, and rewriting the dying boy's cry to reflect weapons that killed after impact rather than on it, a change that reflected atomic-age warfare.
Writers, Directors, and the Workshop as Seedbed
After The Fall of the City, the Workshop's invitation list expanded considerably. Pare Lorentz, Alfred Kreymborg, Stephen Vincent Benét, Dorothy Parker, and William Saroyan began appearing in the credits. Under William N. Robson — who succeeded Reis as director beginning with the December 23, 1937 broadcast — Wilbur Daniel Steele adapted his own short stories, Thornton Wilder contributed work, and a young Arthur Laurents got early credits. Robson also worked with Arch Oboler, known from Lights Out!, and Pare Lorentz, who wrote and directed Ecce Homo, a piece about the relationship between man and technology.
The Workshop's status as a writer's theater was formalized by its pay structure: scripts ran $100 each, and the network was eventually receiving 7,000 submissions a year. Almost every director at CBS eventually worked on the Workshop simply to handle the volume. Norman Corwin had material on the air as early as 1938, when his adaptation of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage aired; he took over leadership of the series by fall 1940 and opened the post-war revival on February 2, 1946. Lucille Fletcher contributed fantasy-comedies including My Client Curley — about a dancing caterpillar — and The Man with the One Track Mind, in which a man decides to become a locomotive. A Workshop episode called Double Ugly was later repeated on Suspense, illustrating a direct line from the Workshop's unsponsored experimentation to CBS's commercial dramatic programming. Ed Gardner appeared in Workshop comedic stories portraying a wiseguy telling tall tales — material that led directly to his Forecast pilot for Duffy's Tavern. William Spier, who produced and directed on the Workshop, would later collaborate with Fletcher and Herrmann on Suspense.
The series also adapted a wide range of literary material: Karel Čapek's R.U.R. on April 18, 1937 — noted as the radio play in which the word "robot" first appeared on American air — T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral on July 23, 1938, Dr. Seuss's The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins on August 18, 1940, and Euripides' The Trojan Women on December 8, 1940, broadcast as a wartime statement about the relevance of ancient anti-war themes to the present. John Cage composed the music for The City Wears a Slouch Hat — a Kenneth Patchen collaboration broadcast May 31, 1942 — and originally wrote a 250-page score designed to use sound effects exclusively as musical instruments. Told it was impossible to produce, he scaled it to five percussionists with live and recorded effects. The response at CBS was mixed at best; some listeners praised the broadcast, some suggested the collaborators be committed to an asylum. Cage went to the CBS offices expecting further commissions and was turned away. His score was left with the network, and the manuscript eventually turned up in the basement of the New York Public Library, where it had sat unknown as part of an archive of CBS musical materials. It was eventually published in 2010.
Cancellation, Revival, and the Final Years
CBS canceled the Workshop in 1942 with a rationale that carried a certain irony: the network cited the panic caused by Orson Welles's War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938 and the Workshop's own Air Raid as evidence that the series was too experimental for wartime, classifying it as "too frolicsome for wartime consumption." The connection was real in one direction the network didn't name — historians and the Library of Congress's National Recording Preservation Board have noted that The Fall of the City's pseudo-newscast format and focus on empty icons "greatly infused Welles' production of War of the Worlds."
The series returned in March 1944 and again in 1946, with Norman Corwin opening the post-war revival. That run included a T.S. Eliot reading of his Four Quartets and ended January 25, 1947, with an episode called The Natural History of Nonsense, after which the timeslot transitioned to a musical series called Once upon a Tune. A third iteration, titled the CBS Radio Workshop and subtitled "radio's distinguished series to man's imagination," ran from January 27, 1956 through September 22, 1957. It was championed by CBS vice president William Froug, who had grown up with the original series and pitched the revival to director Howard Barnes. The 1956–57 run adapted work by John Cheever, Robert A. Heinlein, Sinclair Lewis, H.L. Mencken, James Thurber, and Mark Twain, alternating production between East and West Coast. Music came from Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith, and Leith Stevens, among others. All 86 episodes of that final run survive.
Across the original 1936–1947 run, more than 225 episodes survive on tape, with the full count given as 379 episodes of which 347 are accounted for. The Workshop received the 1946 Peabody Award for Outstanding Entertainment in Drama. What it left behind wasn't just recordings but a set of techniques — the electronic filter for telephone voice, the layered crowd effect, the isolation booth for narrator separation — that became routine in radio production long after the series ended. Scholar Harry Heuser noted in 2018 that the word "workshop" in the title was deliberately chosen to distinguish the program from "the factory conditions of creating regular and steady output for network radio." That distinction, built into the name from the beginning, was the promise the series spent twenty years trying to keep.