Waves of Facts Blend in Radio Plays’ Fiction

It’s not exactly a reunion. But today, for the first time in half a century, old friends Dan O’Herlihy and Peggy Webber will play opposite each other again.

The last time was when Webber played Lady MacDuff to his MacDuff in Orson Welles’ 1948 movie of “Macbeth.”

This time, she gets to play Irish actor Eileen Crowe to O’Herlihy’s F.J. McCormick, a star of the Abbey Theatre and Crowe’s husband, at the Cinegrill in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in one of a trilogy of radio plays by Orange County writer Jordan R. Young.

“But that’s not why we’re doing it,” said Webber, perhaps best remembered as Ma Friday on the original “Dragnet” radio program, who also is producing and directing the trilogy, collectively titled “Hollywood Is a State of Mind,” a series of imagined encounters among historical figures.

“Jordan has submitted a number of plays to me before, and these show his ability and versatility,” she noted. “I also feel that the subject is most appropriate for the Cinegrill, where all the images are of Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford.”

Indeed, Chaplin and Pickford--along with George Bernard Shaw, Damon Runyon and John Ford--figure prominently in these three short works, which will be broadcast later as a production of California Artists Radio Theatre (10 p.m. Sundays on KPFK-FM [90.7]).

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Historical personalities of stage and screen have been at the center of Young’s writing for years. The author of a dozen or so self-published books, such as “Spike Jones Off the Record,” “Acting Solo” and “Reel Characters,” Young has made a career as a chronicler of Hollywood and theatrical history.

“Each of these plays takes fact and fiction and mixes them,” Young, 47, said in a recent interview in Orange, where he lives with his wife, an insurance claims investigator. “Sometimes knowing so many facts gets in my way as a playwright. I have to continually remind myself that, ‘Hey, this is theater.’ This is not a documentary. I’m not writing a history book.’ ”

To “mess around with the facts and take dramatic license” means breaking old habits, he said. Even in these plays, he added, “I’m very careful in terms of plausibility.”

The first of the trilogy, “St. Bernard and the Virgin Mary,” takes place on the set of Chaplin’s 1925 silent classic, “The Gold Rush,” where Pickford (played by Linda Henning) meets Shaw (O’Herlihy) and asks him for the rights to produce and star in a film version of “Saint Joan.”

Shaw came to Hollywood once, in fact, but many years later. Pickford co-founded United Artists with Chaplin (played by John Astin), but was not in “The Gold Rush,” which he produced for United Artists. Chaplin was the plausible link, however, because he knew Shaw and could have introduced them.

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Pickford, who was looking to break out of her Cinderella screen image, certainly had the ambition and the talent to play Joan of Arc, which Shaw had turned into one of the great women’s roles of the 20th century.

After Young completed the first draft of “St. Bernard and the Virgin Mary,” he discovered that Pickford had approached Shaw for the rights to “Caesar and Cleopatra.”

“This delighted me,” the 47-year-old writer said, “because there was already a joke in the script that has Shaw saying to Pickford, ‘I expect the next thing you and Doug (Douglas Fairbanks, her husband) will want to do is ‘Caesar and Cleopatra.’ And she says, ‘Doug is dying to play Cleopatra.’ So I was very close.”

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The second play, “The Man Who Robbed the Abbey Theatre,” dramatizes a confrontation between Hollywood film director John Ford (played by William Windom) and McCormick, who is considered among the finest Irish actors (Young says, the finest) ever to emerge from the Abbey Theatre.

McCormick and the Abbey players had toured America in the mid-1930s and came to Hollywood, where they did Ford’s movie version of “The Plough and the Stars,” the Sean O’Casey play that they’d previously done at the Abbey.

The experience left McCormick never wanting to make another movie, Young said. “He hated Ford, hated film, hated Hollywood. Ford was very manipulative, not a nice guy [to his actors].”

The premise for the play is that Ford goes to Ireland and asks McCormick and his actors to appear in “The Long Voyage Home.” Ford and McCormick meet backstage at the Abbey after a performance of “King Lear.”

The third play, “Demon in Paradise,” centers on Runyon (played by Elliott Reid), who came to Hollywood to produce a movie based on one of his stories, “The Big Street.” (It starred Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball.)

“These pieces are light fare for the summer,” Webber said. “But we take them seriously. We try to sound like the characters.”

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O’Herlihy used to do a one-man show on Shaw, “so he has studied Shaw extensively,” she said. “Dan also worked with McCormick.” Astin listened to Chaplin’s talkies, and Henning “got two or three of the [late] Pickford films” to study her voice.

Most important, Webber said, “is that we’re all a devoted group of actors who want to keep radio drama going. With interesting writers like Jordan, I hope we will.”

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* “Hollywood Is a State of Mind” plays today and Sunday, 1:30 p.m., at the Cinegrill, Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, 7000 Hollywood Blvd. $15. (323) 466-7000.