September 25, 1997, is the 100th
anniversary of William Faulkner’s birth. To mark that occasion, Centennial
Faulkner will be a three-hour special on National Public Radio, hosted by
Stacy Keach.
Each of the three one-hour segments will examine a
different aspect of Faulkner’s life and work, with commentary by Shelby Foote
and a number of other writers and scholars. Each segment will also include a
radio drama adapted from a Faulkner short story and recorded in stereo,
featuring actors from film and the Broadway stage. Mississippi Public Radio
will air Centennial Faulkner on Tues., Weds., Thurs., September 23, 24, and 25
from 6:30-7:30 p.m., and repeat all three shows on Sat., Sept. 27 from 1-4
p.m.
The first segment in the series will look at
Faulkner as a renegade writer and harsh critic of the Southern culture that
produced him. One of the weapons he used was irony. The story to be dramatized
here is the classic tall tale "Spotted
Horses," in which a mysterious stranger appears in the Mississippi
town of Frenchman's Bend with a herd of wild range ponies. Tony Award-winning
actor John glover plays the one-cared Texan Buck Hipps, who'll auction off the
horses to the hapless townsmen whose desperate condition makes them all too
eager to embrace the illusion of power and speed. The drama, adapted from
Faulkner’s novel The Hamlet, also features performances by another Tony
winner, Betty Buckley, along with Will Patton, Lois Smith and Bill Raymond.
Segment two will look at Faulkner as a man whose
complex novelistic style often hides the face that he was a born storyteller.
His fiction began with himself — he was an intensely private man who hated
publicity and seldom gave a straight answer about his own personal life. His
talents as a spinner of tales found him a place in Hollywood, where he worked
most often with the acclaimed director Howard Hawks. The program will discuss
his experience in Hollywood (caricatured in the movie Barton Fink), his
extramarital affair with Hollywood script girl Meta Carpenter, and his
legendary drinking. The story to be dramatized here is an example of
Faulkner’s more commercial fiction, written in the Hollywood style. Campbell
Scott, Michael O'Keefe and Hope Davis lead the cast of "Honor,"
a fractured love story about barnstorming pilots in the aftermath of World War
I.
The third and final segment will examine the
current debate over Faulkner’s treatment of women and blacks. Among the
speakers will be feminists, African American scholars and thos who believe
Faulkner was a harsh critic of both racism and the oppression of women. The
program will feature a story that demonstrates how Faulkner viewed both women
and blacks — "Mountain Victory."
In this dark, haunting story of class and racial conflict, a Confederate major
returning from Appomattox with his former slave must deal with a Tennessee
mountain family whose embittered son has fought for the Union. Performing in
the dramatized version of the story are Stacy Keach, David Strathairn, Jeffrey
Wright (star of the recent film Basquiat), Welker White and Jeffrey
DeMunn.
Producer of the series is Robert Clem, a fellow at
the Sundance Institute whose prior radio productions aired on NPR Playhouse
include Hamilton v. Burr: A Strange Case of Homicide, with Eli Wallach
and Henderson Forsythe; the five-part series Child of the Sun: The
Expedition of Hernando de Soto, hosted by Eli Wallach; and the two-part Tall
Tales from the Hunters' Camp, based on stories by nineteenth century
Southern writer William Gilmore Simms.
