[In the following review, originally published in New York Post on May 29, 1987, Barnes calls Bogosian's Talk Radio “a scathing document of a frightening, frightened man and the America he creates and lives in.”]

Eric Bogosian's strange and important play Talk Radio—based on an original idea by Tad Savinar—which opened at the Public Theater last night, concerns a very sick man and the misuse of power.

If the medium is the message, the messages that the media deliver can sometimes be extraordinarily disturbing.

The potential coercive danger of radio and television as instruments of totalitarian persuasion, sometimes induced by hysteria, megalomania, and even paranoia, is not merely of passing interest to the Federal Communications Commission. Its fantasy is part of our real world.

The odd power of talk radio—particularly when it is an isolated voice in the small hours of a silent night—is most pungently brought home by a play that is so verismatic, in both writing and playing, that it seems to be happening before our very ears.

Bogosian is Barry Champlain, an upwardly mobile, upwardly sterile, Cleveland radio personality—he started in Akron—whose late-night call-in advice-and-insult show is about to go network.

Champlain is a man of complex simplicity. A loner who is cynical, amoral, abrasive, opinionated, prejudiced, and iconoclastic, he can only be himself in front of a microphone.

He comes alive for his spectral audience; beyond that audience he is a man who sits alone in a diner staring desolately at a half-empty beer glass.

He has no friends, no views, no real thoughts. He is a compulsive puppet pulled by the separate strings of the man he started out to be and the man he has, through inevitable ambition, become.

Now he is a juggernaut of power without responsibility. He is both a sign for our times, and yet also—as so skillfully portrayed on many levels by Bogosian—a brilliantly credible character.

The play is nothing but Champlain's radio hour, with people calling in, and the studio and studio people surrounding these wilderness voices in the wastelands of Ohio.

The voices, and the faceless people behind them, are manipulated and insulted, in a way that is funny, bitter, and sad. The caricature is so slight—it could almost be a genuine talk-radio transcript; the essential exaggeration is that viciously minimal—but the impact suggests both a dirge for our society and a wake for the living death of a once talented man.

I was reminded, more than once, of that Budd Schulberg short story, and the Elia Kazan film made of it, “A Face in the Crowd,” about a corrupt TV personality.

Where Bogosian scores here is in showing Champlain not only as corrupt but, just as important, also corrupted. This Champlain is his own last victim, just as surely as the dupes he gulls, cheats, and bullies over the air.

Unlike most of my colleagues, I have never been a fan of Bogosian as a monologist—I have a general aversion to this new breed of theatrical ego-trippers—but here to the three-dimensional Bogosian I totally succumb.

The man is as brilliant as his dizziest admirers claim, and the writing here is as disciplined as the acting—discipline being the last word one could apply to his earlier monologues.

The play has been tautly staged, with split-second awareness of radio as an exercise in time, by Frederick Zollo. Tad Savinar's photo-visuals, a running commentary of back projections, offer a lovely counterpoint to, and commentary on, the dialogue, while David Jenkins's radio-station setting is convincing, although perhaps not quite seedy enough.

The acting, even apart from Bogosian, is absolutely right.

Zach Grenier and Linda Atkinson are horribly convincing as oozing radio personalities; John C. McGinley, Robyn Peterson, and, as the ruthless radio producer, Mark Metcalf, are perfect as Champlain's untouched inner circle; and Michael Wincott chills as a prankster dope-head.

This is a play that should be seen—it is accurately a scathing document of a frightening, frightened man and the America he creates and lives in.