Radio Where All Things Considered Unconventionally

Daring to push the programming envelope at National Public Radio may seem to be no big thing. After all, noncommercial NPR is where experimental, groundbreaking radio thrives. It’s those other radio stations, dependent on sponsors and Arbitron ratings, where going against programming formulas is the quickest way out the door.

Isn’t it?

According to Ira Glass--at 37, an 18-year NPR veteran and creator of the 6-month-old series “This American Life”--bucking the NPR system is like bucking any other system: “You get funny looks sometimes, you get told ‘no’ a lot, and you wonder if anyone out there wants to air your program.”

In a sense, the broadcast of “This American Life”--a free-form, stylish compendium mixing quirky reporting on hidden pockets of Americana with often deeply personal storytelling--is a litmus test of how adventurous the NPR network is. The hourlong show’s stories can run longer than 30 minutes (more than three times the length of a standard report or story heard on NPR’s news shows, “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered”) and touch on topics such as transsexuals in the Deep South and sagas of family betrayals that fit into no other NPR format.

As with every program produced with NPR in mind, each of the approximately 450 network affiliates has the option of picking up “This American Life” (as does KCRW-FM in Santa Monica), rejecting it outright or taking a wait-and-see approach. Many of the stations he’s talked with, according to Glass, have taken the latter option.

Says one NPR insider: “It’s not surprising, because NPR is really conservative underneath, and this show can’t be categorized. It isn’t [Garrison Keillor], it isn’t ‘Car Talk.’ They don’t know what to make of it.”

On the same day, however, that Glass talks by phone from his office at Chicago-based WBEZ-FM, where he produces “This American Life,” he learns that the show has picked up three new affiliates in Seattle; Urbana, Ill.; and Dillingham, Ark. “That’s three more than we had yesterday, which was two,” Glass says with characteristic dryness.

(As much as he wants the world to know about his show, though, Glass resists being photographed by the press. Instead, he provides his own photo, showing him playfully hiding from view. “It’s important,” he explains, “to keep my identity as just a radio voice. Radio isn’t about faces.”)

Glass is steeled for his ongoing radio experiment, since he spent three years in the early ‘90s applying for Corp. for Public Broadcasting grants and was rejected every time. During this time, the MacArthur Foundation was looking for fresh arts programming to fund, while Glass continued producing his first free-form show, “The Wild Room,” created with co-producer Gary Covino and cartoonist-playwright Lynda Barry.

Though Glass gets his share of rejections, he also knows he has fans in NPR-land, since they urged the MacArthur funders to consider him.

“It was a lucky accident, because I wasn’t even looking for a grant from their direction,” says Glass, who bolstered the $6,000 MacArthur grant with $2,000 out of his own pocket to produce pilots for the new show, initially titled “Your Radio Playhouse.”

Perhaps best known to “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” listeners for his personal and penetrating reports on the day-to-day lives of kids in Chicago’s beleaguered high schools, Glass resists drawing a line in the sand between reporting and storytelling. His casting for regular contributors to “This American Life” reflects that view.

They include the disparate storytelling voices of Los Angeles-based writer-performer Sandra Tsing Loh, author David Sedaris and Chicago playwright Beau O’Reilly, as well as unapologetically subjective reporting from contributing editors Jack Hitt, Paul Tough and Margy Rochlin, also based in L.A.

Hitt’s epic report, “Dawn,” remains a Glass favorite, combining track-down-the-story journalism with the patina of a tall tale as it could only happen in the Deep South. Hitt went to Charleston, S.C., to uncover the hidden truths behind the city’s most scandalous celebrity, writer Gordon Langley Hall, who became Dawn Langley Simmons after a sex-change operation.

No less true, though, are Loh’s hilarious pieces (which she has performed live in slightly different versions at various L.A. venues), including accounts of her family’s wild, death-defying vacation in Ethiopia and her father’s various Chinese wives, or Sedaris’ brittle, neurotically tinged stories about hitchhiking and surviving in the big city.

“I believe that the stories should feel somewhat live,” Glass observes, “and that the documentary reports should give the feel of a narrative. What I look for is stuff that’s funny and sad and reveals something about the American character.

“If we don’t have surprises in these stories every two minutes or so, they don’t work. David and Sandra make a left or right turn in their pieces every minute or so, which is exactly the rhythm of an NPR broadcast. I’ve had that form driven into me ever since I started at NPR when I was 19.”

Possibly because of Glass’ long track record at the network--assisting producers at the Washington bureau, reporting from his Chicago base at WBEZ for six years, covering the 1992 Clinton campaign--he is very picky behind the mike.

“He’s a real perfectionist,” Loh says, “and really brilliant about making great radio, but it’s not like I haven’t come out of some sessions screaming, ‘I never want to do this again!’ That passes after a few moments, because I realize that Ira’s sort of a visionary, only with his ears. He hears things in his head before anyone else can, and puts pieces together and makes them work.”

What Glass wants to hear in the future is typical of his throw-out-the-format style: “I want to bring in some of these people who call themselves ‘audio artists,’ like Greg Whitehead, who does montages of people screaming. It’s hysterical stuff. And there’s this great 24-hour Chicago hot dog stand called the Weiner Circle, which has eight of the world’s happiest people working inside this tiny, steamy takeout joint, and the customers at night are derelicts and cops. I have to record that place. . . .”

* “This American Life” airs 6-7 p.m. Saturdays on KCRW-FM (89.9).