Joe Frank Adds Own Realism to Radio Drama

The paradox of maverick Joe Frank is that Frank, the most innovative radio dramatist in Los Angeles, has nothing but negatives to heap on the concept of radio drama.

“Those programs seem so artificial and the minute one comes on, I can tell I’m listening to a radio play and must suspend my disbelief to enjoy it,” says Frank, whose “Work in Progress” airs twice weekly over KCRW-FM (89.9) (Wednesdays at 7 p.m., Saturdays at 11 p.m.).

“I don’t want my audience to have to suspend their disbelief,” he said. “I want them to wonder what the hell is going on. Is this real or not?”

A combination monologist-philosopher-black comic-shrink, Frank strips away radio’s genteel veneer of good vibes and exposes the private fears that plague us all; in fact, “Work in Progress” seems so disturbingly real that one feels a bit of a voyeur even listening. Imagine eavesdropping as the couple in the next apartment break up, listening in on someone’s session with a therapist, or being forced to watch as a loved one endures an episode of deep humiliation, and you’ll have some idea of the queasy fascination of “Work in Progress.”

Erasing the line separating fact and fiction, Frank presents stories reduced to a skeletal structure of severe, jagged angles, or embroidered to the point that they take on a quality of fantastic realism reminiscent of Borges.

In “Rent a Family,” the listener follows the psychological disintegration of a lonely, divorced woman with two children who rents her family to single men who yearn to experience family life. “A Pact With God” recounts Frank’s own experience when his father was diagnosed as having cancer, while “Emergency Room” incorporates a kind of audio verite with sound bites made in an actual hospital emergency room.

“My shows address the universals that speak to so many of us: loneliness, mortality, the questions of suffering and evil, the problems of loving, ambivalence and anger,” Frank explains during an interview at KCRW. “Bizarre stories are also interesting--and I do use them--but they have to work on another, deeper level that invites listener identification.”

Syndicated in 13 major cities, “Work in Progress” has won numerous awards since it debuted in 1986 and has a devoted cult following. It also has garnered Frank a contract with show business agency ICM, a book deal with William Morrow Co. (a compilation culled from Frank’s radio shows will be published next fall) and numerous movie business lunches. Stages, a local theater company, will present a production of “Rent a Family” next year.

“I’m confused by all these offers,” confesses Frank, a ruggedly handsome man of 49. “The only reason to go into these other mediums is to reach a larger audience, and if I could reach as many people through radio as I could in film or television, I’d stay in radio. The human mind is much larger than a movie screen, and with radio each listener has to meet me halfway and apply his own imagination in order to fulfill the experience.”

Though radio has proven to be the ideal vehicle for Frank, it’s a discovery he made relatively recently. Born in 1939 in Strasbourg, France, to a Viennese mother and Polish father who were in flight from the Nazis, Frank was raised in New York, where he spent much of his childhood recovering from leg operations to correct clubfeet.

Inspired to write after reading William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury,” he attended the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop and wound up employed by a private school in Manhattan, where he taught classes of his own invention that combined literature and philosophy.

“I’m not an academician,” says Frank, “but I’d say that Dostoyevsky--particularly his ‘Notes from the Underground’--Kafka’s short stories and Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’ have been more of an influence on me than anything.”

Frank’s radio career began in 1977 when he hosted “In the Dark,” a comedy show on WBAI in New York. Free-lance work as a writer and producer followed, including several shows done for National Public Radio while he was living in Washington, D.C. In 1986, KCRW general manager Ruth Hirschman offered him a show at her Santa Monica station, so he pulled up stakes and moved to the small house in Venice where he presently lives.

While Frank used to premiere a new show every week, “Work in Progress” now alternates one new show with a rerun. “I’m not able to work as fast as I used to because I think my standards have gone up,” he explains.

It’s surprising that Frank is able to turn out two episodes a month in light of how complex and impeccably produced his shows are. Working with a group of improvisational actors in New York, he fleshes out the stories with imagined conversations, simple sound effects, hypnotic passages of music and third-person narration.

“Editing is one of the most important aspects of what I do,” says Frank. “The actors I use work improvisationally and we never work with scripts. I explain the key ideas I want them to get across but I encourage them to do it in their own way and to feel free to take things in directions I may not have thought of. Working that way, you end up with endless hours of material, and as an editor you have to make sense of it all and put it together seamlessly.”

While the fine tuning may take place in an editing room, the blood and bones of “Work in Progress” are the stories themselves. As to where he finds his exotic tales, Frank notes: “I keep an eye out, and people who listen to the show often call me and say ‘I have a story you might be interested in’--and I check them all out. Roughly three-quarters of these encounters yield usable stories. I often patch things together using part of one person’s story with part of something else; other times I’ll get an entire show based on one monologue. I often spend five hours talking to a person and use a 15-minute segment of what they said.”

The question obviously arises: What makes these people confess their deepest secrets to a total stranger?

“First of all, I pay them,” Frank says. “I think it would be exploitative not to pay them. Beyond that, I’m a very good listener. The way I listen is like a combination of psychologist and father confessor. Together, we explore the stories they have to tell.”

In talking with Frank, it’s easy to see how he gets people to open up. A soft-spoken, unassuming man with an open, compassionate face, Frank has a discreetly probing manner and a gentle way of steering the conversation in the direction he’d like it to take. His secret weapon, however, is his talent for making you feel that he’s genuinely interested in what you have to say, that, in fact, you’re probably the most fascinating person he’s ever met. The most tightly sealed lips invariably open up when anointed with some delicately applied flattery.

The nakedly personal tone of “Work in Progress” obscures the fact that, while Frank is at the center of each episode working the puppet strings, he actually reveals little of himself.

“People often approach me assuming they know me; they don’t,” he asserts. “I don’t like the spotlight and get really uncomfortable if I have to talk about myself. I went through a phase where I was telling highly revealing stories about my family, my relationships with women and so forth, but it reached the point where it was bordering on self-indulgence and I then realized there were other lives I could explore.”

Occasionally criticized as being pointlessly dark, lurid and misogynistic, Frank maintains that “My only intention is to create shows that move people and make them feel less lonely. I think we all agree that loneliness is a major problem in life. There was a time in my own life when the loneliness I felt was so intense that it was like an unbearable weight on my chest. I can remember kneeling before the telephone praying that it would ring.

“I found that writing about my life was an invaluable tool in helping me transcend those dark periods. Writing is a way of distancing yourself from an experience and seeing more clearly what’s happening. I really believe that things can be transcended through art, that it’s a way of transforming suffering into something good.”