Here We Are

Santa Barbara Theatre of the Air

The SBTA offers its repertory of radio productions for free download.

Not “old-time radio,” these are broadcast presentations of some of the world’s most gifted classic and contemporary playwrights: Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, Luigi Pirandello, Susan Glaspell, George Kelly, Noel Coward, Harold Pinter, Vaclav Havel, Eric Bentley, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Frank Gilroy, Jason Miller, Benjamin Bettenbender, Laura Cahill, Murray Schisgal and many others.

Each week a different radio comedy/drama will be podcast here.

Tune in! You may discover gems you never knew existed!

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Here We Are, by Dorothy Parker (Comedy)

Production 20:
Here We Are, by Dorothy Parker (Comedy)
Starring David Courtenay and Jamie Hixon
[Playing Time: 19:33]

(When the wedding bells fade, the great adventure begins!)

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) was an American writer and poet, best known for her caustic wit, wisecracks, and sharp eye for 20th century urban foibles. She was born Dorothy Rothschild in Long Branch, New Jersey, but grew up in New York City and attended Roman Catholic elementary school. She was asked to leave following her characterization of the Immaculate Conception as “spontaneous combustion.” She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair magazine in 1914 and some months later was hired as an editorial assistant at Vogue, then became a staff writer at Vanity Fair. In 1917, she met and married Edwin Pond Parker, a Wall Street stock broker, but they were separated by his army service in World War I. In 1919, her career blossomed while writing theatre criticism for Vanity Fair. There she met Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood who, along with Franklin Pierce Adams and Alexander Woollcot, began lunching at the Algonquin Hotel and became founding members of the Algonquin Round Table. Through their re-printing of her lunchtime remarks and short verses, Dorothy began developing a national reputation as a wit. In the 1920s alone she published some 300 poems and free verses in major magazines and newspaper columns. Her best-known short story, “Big Blonde”, received the O. Henry Award as the best short story of 1929. Her short stories, though often witty, were also spare and incisive, and more bittersweet than comic. During the 1930s and 1940s, Parker became a vocal advocate of increasingly radical causes, a fierce civil libertarian and civil rights advocate and a frequent critic of those in authority. Because of some of her associations and causes, she was listed as a Communist by the publication Red Channels in 1950. As a result, she was placed on the Hollywood blacklist by the movie studio bosses. From 1957 to 1962 she wrote book reviews for Esquire. Parker died of a heart attack at the age of 73 in 1967. She bequeathed her estate to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. foundation; following King’s death, her estate passed to the NAACP. Her ashes remained unclaimed in various places, including her attorney Paul O’Dwyer’s filing cabinet, for approximately 17 years. In 1988, the NAACP claimed Parker’s remains and designed a memorial garden for them outside their Baltimore headquarters. The plaque reads in part, “For her epitaph, she suggested, ‘Excuse my dust.'”

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FROM THE MINDS OF PLAYWRIGHTS:It is easy when we are in prosperity to give advice to the afflicted. - Aeschylus