Library Foundation Plots a Fitting Salute : Radio: A performance of ‘The Plot to Overthrow Christmas’ will be the tribute to Norman Corwin.

Norman Corwin does not much care for ceremonials and tributes. Last month, when he was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame, the 83-year-old maestro of the airwaves absented himself from the Chicago festivities and Studs Terkel stepped in to read his acceptance speech.

But ask the noted playwright-director-author-performer-commentator about his “Plot to Overthrow Christmas,” which can be heard Friday in a live performance on KNX-AM (1070) at 8 p.m.--with subsequent airings on KUSC-FM (Dec. 17), KPCC-FM (Dec. 19) and KIEV-AM (Dec. 23, 24, 25)--and he spontaneously delivers a dramatized snippet of the half-hour classic he calls “an insouciant, funny play.”

For Corwin--who began as a newspaperman in Springfield, Mass., at age 17 (fibbing that he was 24), then went on to network radio (CBS), where his enlightened commentaries “opened and closed World War II,” according to an observer of the scene--the play’s the thing, not the honors.

So what was the Thousand Oaks Library Foundation to do? It wanted to properly celebrate Corwin, who was donating his works, to be added to the CBS archives that it already houses. But the honoree politely demurred.

Instead, there will be a gala performance of “Plot to Overthrow Christmas”--at 55, the oldest extant radio script. And it boasts a stellar cast including Richard Crenna, Samantha Eggar, Roddy McDowall and David Warner, members of the award-winning California Artists Radio Theatre, which harks back to the medium’s Golden Age.

Corwin explains how, in 1938, the witty, rhyming play--his first--came to be written.

“Christmas had little to do with it,” he says. “I’d been producing a series called ‘Poetic License’ on the New York Times station, WQXR, and somebody at CBS noticed it and hired me to do a weekly show. An upcoming date for my program fell on that holiday, so. . . .”--the occasion dictated the subject matter.

In fact, much of Corwin’s career as a spokesman for the ideals of freedom as embodied in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights has so evolved. “It was the exigencies of wartime radio,” he says, “that typecast me for the big spectrum issues on human rights . . . so central to defeating fascism and liberating Europe.”

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A humanist for all seasons, he was not about to bypass any opportunity “The Plot to Overthrow Christmas” might afford to underscore idealism. With a light, Ogden Nash touch, he pits history’s villains--Haman, Nero, the Devil, Caligula, Borgia--against (the unconquerable) Santa Claus. “Their goal is to rub him out,” chuckles a tall and tweedy Corwin, who still looks a tad Eastern after living more than three decades in Los Angeles.

California Artists Radio Theatre executive director Peggy Webber, long a fan of Corwin’s, got the playwright to add two roles for Friday’s production: Salome and Attila the Hun, the latter written especially for Stan Freberg. “Norman did it in five minutes,” she says admiringly, “and with just the stub of a pencil.”

Both Corwin and Webber are dedicated to radio. For good reason he calls her “the Hillary Clinton of radio drama”; she arranged the satellite transmission that will allow 500 stations to pick up and tape the performance.

To some extent, however, they are victims of a time warp. Radio’s heyday ended with the advent of television; executives refocused their energy and dollars to the home screen, as did advertisers.

“It was like ending a ride on a white horse,” says a reflective Corwin. “The (radio) networks dissolved and turned to TV. There was no more distribution or budget. And serious radio drama had to take refuge in a ghetto, kept alive by public broadcasting and FM stations.”

That wasn’t all. After the war a new putative threat loomed--Communism. And when Corwin predictably voiced sympathy for those under harassment by the House Committee on Un-American Activities--together with Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, he put on programs protesting the committee’s tactics--CBS dropped his contract. “He went into eclipse,” says Webber.

His innovations were not lost, though. The sound devices and the language he created for his dramatic productions found their way to Robert Altman, who cites Corwin as a major influence in his films. Nor did he stop writing--both scripts (“Lust for Life”) and books, the most recent one a text for Paul Conrad’s “CONartist.”

“But my first love is radio,” Corwin says. “It makes a collaborator of the listener--through his imagination and because nothing is literal. The ear, after all, is the poet of the senses. It can perceive the most abstract and universal of the arts, music, and it can make the word sovereign. Sometimes, you know, a word is worth a thousand pictures.

“One thing I feel deeply: With this surfeit of visuals we face (TV), radio will have a standing as the theater of the mind. There’s considerable real estate attached to it.”