The Dark Progress of Joe Frank

The Dark Progress of Joe Frank by Ralph Rugoff

LA Style 1989 November

KCRW's twisted genius pushes the envelope of radio drama Joe Frank's "Night," a one-and-a-half-hour radio monologue first broadcast in 1988, builds to a moment so unrelievedly dark that it imprints itself on the listener's mind like a black hole, causing ordinary compassion and sympathy to flounder and fail. Frank's voice is clipped and hypnotically driven, barely wavering from a monotone as he weaves his program around a web of hard-luck narratives: A hapless fry cook accidentally burns down a restaurant; a small-chested stripper receives a toxic silicone implant as a birthday present; a New Age preacher is exposed for having sex with a male staff member who later commits suicide. Finally, Frank relates the story of one of the preacher's followers, a Vietnam veteran who has desperately battled his own suicidal impulses and is slowly dying inside. He loses his sense of smell; his hearing deteriorates; he experiences numbness in his hands and feet. And it occurs to him that he's withdrawing from life, but there's nothing he can do about it because he stopped caring a long time ago.

What makes this portrait of despair additionally chilling is that, like all of Frank's monologues, it's based on a true story.

"I never wanted to produce radio programs in order to comfort anybody," says Frank. "People are comforted enough. Radio and television dramas typically end with a resolution of problems. But in real life 'happy endings' are just the beginnings of new problems. I want my program to be about the way life really is, even if it is often painful. "I find the darkness powerful," Frank adds. "I find it almost religious in some sense. It's almost as if the darker these stories are, the more profound they become. It's through suffering that we're forced to examine the meaning of our lives."

A weekly program aired in Los Angeles over KCRW-FM, "Joe Frank: Work in Progress," delivers its darkness in two remarkably divergent formats. Frank's monologues, based on biographical material collected in lengthy interviews, explore scenes that arc so squeamishly personal, so harrowingly intimate, that listening to them is akin to reading the journal of a close friend and discovering things you'd rather not have known.

Frank also produces droll ensemble pieces that deftly scramble the factual and the fantastic. In ersatz docudramas like "Rent a Family" (a 1988 show in which a single mother and her children are hired out to lonely bachelors), the humor is Kafkaesque - absurd, dreamlike and decidedly black. Yet for all their comic incongruities, Frank's verité simulations are often spiked with heart-wrenching pathos, as even the most absurd premise is acted out with compelling psychological realism.

Evident in both his monologues and his dramatic pieces is a fascination with alienated characters.

Frank's stories frequently feature individuals who've been derailed from mainstream trajectories and find themselves confronting fears of never getting back on track. Riddled with ambivalence and indecision, they engage in wayward quests for emotional contact and intimacy. Inevitably, they come up against despair and frustration.

"They're alienated people, but then again, who isn't?" Frank asks rhetorically. "In my experience, no matter how normal and integrated someone might seem on the surface, whenever I get to know them really well, I find trouble. I think when you remove the masks and the disguises, we're all fellow sufferers, struggling through life one way or another.

"People who do fit in well, who are integrated, don't really reflect a lack of ambivalence to me. Instead, I think they're just not in touch with their unconscious. In a society like this where you have so much stimulation and so much freedom to choose, how can anyone end up being anything but ambivalent? In a sense we're too intelligent for our own good. We're weighed down by conflicting thoughts, feelings, temptations, options. When you're with one woman, you're thinking about being with another one. And when you're with her, you're thinking of the first one.

"The bottom line is that the human condition is inherently full of ambivalence. In every meaningful relationship, I think you're going to find love, hate, resentment, compassion, cruelty. Nothing," concludes Frank, "is simple."

Frank's Venice neighborhood, a deracinated, fun-and-sun suburb near the beach, seems to belie the dark visions he forges on the radio. And in person, despite his professed belief in the power of darkness, the 49-year-old radio dramatist hardly seems diabolical. His sharply focused eyes and the lines around them suggest the powers of concentration one finds in a concerned psychologist. Durable good looks exude a weathered kindness and there's something about his demeanor - a probing, deeply attentive curiosity - that reminds me that the most dangerous person to interview is a good listener.

Frank's face eases into a cautious smile as he leans back in his Barcalounger and contemplates life in Los Angeles. "I've gotten used to it," he admits. "But when I first moved out here, it seemed far too clean and sunny. I was sure that I was going to die spiritually and would be returned on a railway car in a coffin back to the East Coast."

Death, both spiritual and physical, is a recurring theme in Frank's work. Suicides, fatal accidents and terminal diseases, as well as a host of macabre fears, crop up routinely on his programs. In his stage performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art last spring (sold out for its six-week run), his obsession with mortality took a peculiar twist. In addition to a blood-filled water cooler, the sparse set included a coat rack shaped like a crucifix and a clock stopped at three, which, as Frank points out, is the hour Christ died on the cross.

"I was born with clubfeet and as a child was subjected to repeated surgery, so the idea of crucifixion has a special resonance for me," Frank relates. "Also, my father died when I was five and a half, after an illness that had lasted for two years, and in a way, it was like the death of God. That experience of living in a situation where my father was ill and I was ill, and my mother was young and vital and in a sense burdened by us, certainly had a telling effect on my psyche and sensibility."

Born in Strasbourg, France, in 1939, to a Viennese mother and Polish father in flight from Nazi Germany, Frank grew up in Manhattan. After attending a notoriously permissive school on the Upper West Side, he moved with his widowed mother and stepfather to Great Neck, Long Island. "I was sent to public school at the age of thirteen and for the first time in my life I was confronted with the reality of homework. It was crushing," he recalls. Frank found some consolation in listening to Jean Shepherd, a late-night radio monologist who would fill hours of airtime reminiscing about his Indiana boyhood. "I had difficulty sleeping," Frank remembers, "and it was a comfort having him to listen to late at night. He was entertaining and moving, and he made you feel less lonely. Looking back, that was probably the first time I realized how radio could affect and nourish people's lives."

Eventually graduating "493rd in a class of 508," Frank spent his time in high school daydreaming of athletic glory or dashing off amusing prose pieces he'd hand to his classmates. That flirtation with writing developed into a serious affair during four years at a local community college, and following a postgraduate stint as a night duty volunteer on Bellevue's psychiatric ward, Frank headed west to the celebrated Iowa Writers' Workshop. Two years later, sans degree, he returned to New York, where he spent the next decade teaching English in a private school. His writing plans slowly faded from sight.

In search of an alternative creative outlet, Frank ended up knocking on the door of WBAI, an independent-minded New York radio station run largely by volunteers. After lending a hand on various programs (at one point, editing down a 100-hour reading of a Gertrude Stein opus), a slot opened up for his own show. And then, after ten years of wondering what he was going to do with his life, Joe Frank found himself on the air.

"In the Dark," first broadcast in 1977, was a prototype for Frank's later programs, combining rambling personal monologues with improvised comic skits. From the beginning, he avoided using scripted material. "The performances in radio they're not subtle enough and they overproject. So I decided that when I worked with actors, I would give them only the premise of a situation and then see how far they could take it. And I found that when you do improvisational work with really creative people, they'll think up things you would never have imagined.

"It can be an exciting and wondrous experience when you encounter something done in a way you'd never envisioned before," he continues. "Whenever I've had that kind of experience, whether it was the first time I read 'The Sound and the Fury' or saw an Ingmar Bergman film, it's been very, very powerful. So when I went into radio, I wanted to create a program that would give people a similar experience, something that would make them sit up and wonder 'What the hell is this?' "

One way Frank achieved that effect was by featuring elaborate, improvised put-ons. An actor would be introduced on the show as a distinguished guest, perhaps a best-selling author or a controversial sociologist. Frank would then discuss with him, in quasi-serious fashion, increasingly bizarre topics. On one program, a guest was presented as a world-renowned mime and Frank, after inquiring about the mime's current world tour, asked him to give a live performance. The resulting minute of dead air time - "something you just don't do on radio," Frank points out - divided his audience between befuddled outrage and wry appreciation. On another program, an actor posed as a New Age doctor and took live calls on the air. "His suggestions were so bizarre that it was funny, but it was also cruel," Frank notes, "which is something my programs are still accused of being. But art is about extremes. If you're going to write a love story, you don't write about a mildly satisfying affair."

By 1978, "In the Dark" had drawn the attention of National Public Radio and Frank was hired to host the weekend edition of "All Things Considered." He lasted for three months before resigning. "It was a horrendous experience," he remembers. "They brought me on because they thought I had a good voice, but I had no journalistic experience. I remember talking to Senator Moynihan in his office and finding the situation utterly dreamlike. Frequently during interviews, my mind would start wandering and I'd come back with an hour and a half of tape that was virtually unusable."

Frank ultimately convinced the NPR executives to let him produce radio dramas instead, and for the next seven years he worked in Washington as a free-lance writer/producer. In 1986, he moved to Venice at the invitation of KCRW manager Ruth Hirschman, who offered Frank a weekly show.

Since moving to the movie and TV capital of the world, Frank's radio program has enjoyed an uninterrupted success. In its short lifetime, "Work in Progress" has garnered numerous prizes and awards, as well as significant funding from national radio and arts agencies. In early 1990, William Morrow will release a book compiled from programs being rewritten by Frank for publication. Film producers and directors have already begun courting Frank in a time-honored Hollywood ritual.

The success of Frank's program is indubitably linked to its unnerving, diary-like rawness - and to an audience raised with voyeuristic appetites. "I think we're all interested in how other people live their lives," he comments. "You only have one life, so it's fascinating to see other paths you might have taken. Assuming we're all troubled to some extent, it's particularly interesting to listen to a program that explores people's struggles which, though extreme, are similar to our own."

According to Frank, the fact that his monologues are closely derived from true stories further augments their appeal. "I don't believe it's possible to credibly tell a story that isn't true," he maintains. "Or put it this way - I think true stories are much more interesting than anything you can make up. When people hear something honest and authentic on the air, they know it."

Yet like the proverbial good wine, Frank's offbeat imagination may not travel well. In more commercial media, the unalloyed intensity of his radio shows will most likely be compromised. Even in his performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Frank seemed hesitant to take the same risks with a live audience that he does on the air. Assembled from fragments of past programs, the show was liberally peppered with one-liners.

(Sidebar) "I was always a troublemaker," he quips at one point. "I remember creating; open rebellion in the fourth grade when I told my classmates that the vaccine shots we were about to receive would be administered directly into our eyeballs." (/Sidebar)

Rather than challenging his audience, Frank seemed bent on entertaining them.

One person who was not amused was MOCA curator Julie Lazar, the woman responsible for getting up the show in the first place. "She called me the morning of opening night and told me the show trivialized my work and that, based on my radio programs, she knew I was capable of much deeper material," recalls Frank. "I went into a tailspin. I remember rushing into my den and desperately looking through my files to see if I could somehow put together another show for the performance that night."

While the MOCA piece proved to be an unqualified success with audiences, Frank admits that it wasn't as close to his heart as the rougher-edged "Work in Progress." Having just received several major grants for radio work, he's now concerned with producing new programs which will surpass the risks he's already taken. "I've created these dark shows and now the question is, 'Will Joe Frank just repeat himself, or is he going to take things a step further?' What can I do now so that I won't let down my audience, so that when they turn on the radio, they know something different might happen?

"It may be strange and inappropriate," he continues, "but there are fanatics out there who regularly listen to this program, and I feel compelled to take them places they've never been. In a sense, it's like being a knight and wanting to do wonderful things - even if they are dark and perverse and strange. I want to meet new challenges, to confront new dangers and to honor my listeners by acts of spiritual, if not physical, courage."

In a culture where the term "radio drama" usually evokes bland BBC productions or the nostalgic quaintness of "Prairie Home Companion," Frank's edgy shows seem hopelessly out of sync. Yet by nose-diving into the dark side of the human condition and delving into its pathetic absurdity, desperation and inexplicably enduring hopefulness, Frank's "Work in Progress" has found a growing audience. It may be that in the midst of all that darkness, listeners perceive a glimmering light. Frank certainly does.

"I feel deeply moved by many of the stories I tell on the air. I feel they have to do with the search for meaning and spiritual connection.

"I'm not formally religious, but I constantly wonder and contemplate the purpose of our lives and I marvel at the cruelty of the world we live in. Just outside this house, in my backyard and a few blocks away in the ocean, there's a violent, unseen struggle going on, where in order to survive, members of different species have to kill one another.

"Yet I don't feel the world is a nihilistic vacuum. I just think we don't have a clue as to what's actually going on. There's a reality around us that we cannot grasp, any more than a dog can read Plato. If you can't imagine empty space going on and never ending, or the alternative possibility of it ending somewhere without any space beyond it, then right away you're caught in a conundrum you can't solve.

"Now if we can't imagine either of those possibilities - the only two options our intelligence can fathom - then where are we? How can anybody presume to know the truth about our condition when we can't even understand basic concepts like time and space?"

Frank pauses for a moment to catch up with his thoughts. His corrugated brow suggests a man fascinated by life's biggest questions, questions that make the mind stutter. But while Frank takes them seriously, he isn't naive enough to be looking for long-term answers.

"I feel there's mystery," he explains. "More than we can imagine. And this might sound pretentious, but in a sense, the radio programs are a way for me to try to touch that mystery.

"Maybe it's because my father died when I was young, but I have never wondered if there's any meaning in life. I know there is," he insists with quietly unassailable conviction. "Pursuing that meaning is why I'm on the radio."