NEW YORK (AP) — Long before the rise of podcast dramas, listeners worldwide tuned in to the audio-only narratives of radio plays.
Tom Stoppard and Arthur Miller were among the many playwrights who early in their careers completed brief pieces for radio, while such memorable dramas as Harold Pinter's “A Slight Ache” and Robert Bolt's “A Man for All Seasons” premiered as radio broadcasts. Radio work was often a way to bring in money and to refine the arts of plotting and dialogue.
When Tennessee Williams was a student at the University of Iowa in the late 1930s, still referring to himself by his birth name, Tom Williams, he completed a rarely-heard gothic sketch for radio called “The Strangers.” Williams' play appears this week in The Strand Magazine, which has previously published little-known works by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck among others.
“The play incorporates all the theatrical elements of early radio horror,” writes Strand managing editor Andrew Gulli, “a storm, howling wind, shadows, a house perched over the sea, flickering candles, mysterious footsteps on the stairs, spectral beings — as well as early hints of the themes and devices Williams would return to in his most famous later works: isolation, fear, the shades of gray between imagination and reality, and a house haunted by memory and the private terrors of those who inhabit it.”
Blanche DuBois would famously invoke “the kindness of strangers” in Williams' classic “A Streetcar Named Desire.” You could call this early work “The Horror of Strangers.” His play is set in a columned New England manor on the Atlantic coast, a “ghostly” home squinting under a lighthouse beam that casts a yellowish spell. The title refers to invisible demons who haunt two of the home's residents, Mr. Brighton and Mrs. Brighton.
“We members of the human species are equipped with only five senses. Or six at the very most,” Mr. Brighton declares early on. “The Strangers are creatures that might be perceptible to us if we had seven or eight or maybe nine senses. But as it is, they exist just outside our little sphere of contact with reality and so … what we know of them is very, very slight.”
According to Williams scholar John Bak, “The Strangers” was among a handful of radio dramas the young playwright worked on while in Iowa, where he and his classmates were required to write and produce plays. Bak believes Williams was influenced by commercial considerations and by more personal forces.
Horror stories were popular on radio in the late '30s, Bak says. Williams first thought of radio plays as an “exercise,” but he would eventually take them more seriously. While writing “The Strangers,” he was already haunted by the mental health struggles of his sister, Rose, who would later inspire the fragile Laura Wingfield of “The Glass Menagerie.” Williams would long explore the idea of madness, Bak says, and how we respond to people who seem to see things “no one else can see.”
FILE - Playwright Tennessee Williams sits at his typewriter in New York on Nov. 11, 1940. (AP Photo/Dan Grossi, File)
BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Police in northeastern Spain carried out eviction orders Wednesday to clear an abandoned school building where hundreds of mostly undocumented migrants were living in a squat north of Barcelona.
Knowing that the eviction in the middle of winter was coming, most of the occupants had left to try to find other shelter before police in riot gear from Catalonia's regional police entered the school’s premises early in the morning under court orders. Those who had waited left peacefully.
The squat was located in Badalona, a working class city that borders Barcelona. Many sub-Saharan migrants, mostly from Senegal and Gambia, had moved into the empty school building since it was left abandoned in 2023.
The mayor of Badalona, Xavier García Albiol, announced the evictions in a post on X. “As I had promised, the eviction of the squat of 400 illegal squatters in the B9 school in Badalona begins," he wrote.
The judicial order obliged the Badalona town hall to provide the evicted people with access to social services, but it did not oblige local authorities to find housing for all the squatters.
Lawyer Marta Llonch, who represents the squatters, said that many people would surely end up without shelter in the cold.
“Many people are going to sleep on the street tonight,” Llonch told The Associated Press. “Just because you evict these people it doesn’t mean they disappear. If you don’t give them an alternative place to live they will now be on the street, which will be a problem for them and the city.”
Many of the squatters lived from selling scrap metal collected from the streets. Others had residency and work permits but were forced to live there because they couldn't afford housing during a cost-of-living crunch that is making it difficult even for working Spaniards to buy or rent homes. That housing crisis has led to widespread social angst and public protests.
On leaving the school, people loaded their belongings onto carts, some used as trailers led by bicycles, to haul them away.
García Albiol, of the conservative Popular Party, has built his political career as Badalona's long-standing mayor with an anti-immigration stance.
The Badalona town hall had argued that the squat was a public safety hazard. In 2020, an old factory occupied by around a hundred migrants in Badalona caught fire and four people were killed in the blaze.
Like other southern European countries, Spain has for more than a decade seen a steady influx of migrants who risked their lives crossing the Mediterranean or Atlantic in small boats.
While many developed countries have taken a hard-line position against migration, Spain's left-wing government has said that legal migration has helped its economy grow.
Yankuba Touray, from Gambia, makes coffee in a makeshift kitchen inside an abandoned school in Badalona, near Barcelona, Spain, Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, where hundreds of migrants have been occupying the building. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
Yankuba Touray, from Gambia, eats his breakfast inside an abandoned school in Badalona, near Barcelona, Spain, Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, where hundreds of migrants have been occupying the building.(AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
Migrants from Romania and Senegal sit in a makeshift bar inside an abandoned school in Badalona, near Barcelona, Spain, Monday, Dec. 15, 2025, where hundreds of migrants have been occupying the building. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
Yankuba Touray, from Gambia, stands inside an abandoned school in Badalona, near Barcelona, Spain, Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, where hundreds of migrants have been occupying the building.(AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
