Radio: The Common Touch

Three years ago, when Kraft Television Theater (Wed. 9 p.m., NBCTV) first went on the air, the audience numbered in the thousands, most of them in bars. Last week, as Kraft celebrated its 150th performance, the hour-long show was telecast to an audience of millions, but with little change in the original beer-and-skittles diet that had won friends and fans among the bar watchers.

"The best show for us is the kind that, on the stage, is a great matinee piece," says Producer-Director Stanley Quinn, 35, who came to TV by way of Princeton and radio work in Australia. "Of course," he adds, "we give it tone every now & then with a little Wilde, a little Shakespeare." Working efficiently with his alternate producerdirector, ex-Vaudevillian Maury Holland, 43, Quinn has set up a well-oiled assembly line that uses low-salaried actors (maximum: $250), low-cost scripts (maximum: $500), and a tiny weekly budget of $6,000 (such dramatic rivals as Ford Theater, Philco Playhouse and Lucky Strike Theater average $20,000 a week). Says Holland proudly: "We spend less time fooling around than any other show on the air."

The finished product is probably as good as most summer stock productions. Quinn and Holland aim at leaving their viewers satisfied, if not stimulated. Ideally, says Quinn, "we try to find a story of fairly simple people in an extraordinarily emotional situation." But the ideal specifications cannot always be met. Last week's show, The Queen's Husband, written by Robert Emmet Sherwood in 1928, told how a constitutional monarch outwitted a domineering wife and a dictatorial prime minister by uniting with a Communist-Labor coalition. Kraft's version emerged as pure Graustark, with not a Communist in sight.

Without splurging on big stars or elaborate productions, Kraft intends to keep plugging away at its adaptations of old plays, movies and short stories. Says Holland: "We really believe the play's the thing. That's why there's no long list of credits, writers, production people and all that. Forty seconds after we're on the air, you're into the play. Except for the commercials, you stay there."