By JESSICA LOVE

I have come to Himan Brown's Central Park West apartment to interview the man known as "Mr. Radio Drama"—the recipient of dozens of broadcasting awards, and a 1990 inductee into the Radio Hall of Fame—to uncover the story behind his generous gesture of endowing a drama scholarship at Juilliard in honor of his friend, the actress Marian Seldes. Actually, I will be interviewing the two of them.

Marian Seldes and Himan Brown recall their 60 years of collaboration, in an informal interview at Mr. Brown’s apartment. (Photo by Jessica Love)

Now, I have never met Ms. Seldes, but the air in Juilliard is redolent with her. I have heard stories that she is a force, a gravity, a light—a strict teacher and a genius. She has been nominated for five Tony Awards and five Drama Desk Awards, and has won one of each. She has won two Obies, an Ovation Award, and—oh yes—she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. So naturally, standing in the hallway outside Mr. Brown's apartment, I am doing my best not to become hysterical. But then I remember the story of how she used to call her students "my little birds," and this puts me at ease … well, enough to knock. I suppose it had the same effect on her students.

The door opens and there she is, dressed in purple. "Are you the angel sent to interview us?" Her voice is stately yet warm, like a Grecian urn filled with honey. She takes my coat and conducts me into the living room, where I meet Mr. Brown. He does not look his 95 years, and he speaks with the ease of a man who has spent his life talking with people as he guides me around the room, showing me his collection of paintings. Crowding his walls like the gallery of a salon, these wonderful portraits seem to populate his home. And I realize in this moment that, in his life, Himan Brown has made a habit of keeping excellent company.

Marian calls Himan "Hi," and his effortless conversation does much to endorse the sobriquet. His very name is the beginning of a dialogue. In this case, the dialogue will be a three-hour conversation between the two of them. The way this conversation sprawled and leapt and crackled resists being flattened into a compacted summary, but I will do my best just to frame it for you.

Himan Brown was born in Brooklyn in 1911. When he was a boy, the Yiddish theater played a major role in his life. He and his brother would go to the playhouse and share a ticket, each seeing half of the show. There was one Yiddish actor in particular, Lazar Freed, who shaped Himan's idea of what it meant to work in the theater. He had a saying: "We don't play theater, we make theater." The saying stuck.

In high school, a shop teacher taught Himan about radio. The students wrapped wire around Quaker Oats cereal boxes to build a simple crystal set to catch the airwaves. As Himan left that class, he said to himself, "I'm gonna go on the air." He played hooky one day and showed up at the WRNY radio station at the Roosevelt Hotel, announcing, "I'd like to go on the air." By 2 p.m., he was reciting the poems of Edgar Allan Poe over the airwaves. Soon, he was doing spots at different hotel radio stations all over town.

In 1929 his audio drama The Rise of the Goldbergs was sold to NBC. Other long-running hits included The Thin Man, Grand Central Station, Dick Tracy, and CBS's Radio Mystery Theater, which played seven nights a week for 10 years. In 1946, Marian came to read for one of his radio dramas. She was 18 years old. Soon, she was doing leading roles for him (such as in the serial drama Joyce Jordan, M.D.) in what turned out to be 60 years of collaboration.

"Himan made an acting company out of us," Marian explains, covering his hand with hers. "He knew us so well and instilled that in us … we would read through once, then record! The conviction and confidence he projected allowed us to work at our full potential."

"There is something to listening which we have lost," Himan says. "When I speak to a group of students—and I teach quite often—I say to them, 'You know, I've become very intimate with you. I'm touching every one of you because you're hearing me! And with my voice, I am as intimate with you as I can be on any level.'"

They discuss radio's unique ability to isolate the voice as the vehicle of communication, the power of F.D.R.'s fireside chats. "There was an intimacy in his voice that made people trust him," Marian says. "If an actor knows this, it gives him power.

Read an article about other new scholarships at Juilliard.

"There is a banality in the phrase 'the spoken word,'" Himan says. "I am not interested in people who can 'speak the word' unless they use the voice to connect with other people."

"The people I worked with were creative people in every sense of the word," he continues. "Morris Carnovsky, Peter Lorre, Agnes Moorhead … all those people are gone now." The regret in his voice speaks not only to the loss of those individuals, but also of an approach to the work they personified—an approach which is vanishing. For Himan, Marian is a bastion of this way of working. She says, "The idea to me always has been responsibility to the work, and not to the individual. That has been the crux of our friendship and our work together." After he told Marian about the scholarship, she "suddenly saw my whole career, my whole life ... and this man has been part of it. There aren't many people left in my life who have been in it from the very beginning. And that makes the gift to me so much more important. Because it's a faith in what we both do."

There is something profound happening here, between these two friends. A kind of a mutual recognition not only of the work they have shared, but the way of working which they share, which they have always shared. And the Marian Seldes Drama Scholarship will stand as a monument both to their work and their friendship. It is fitting, too, that the monument isn't a theater bearing Marian's name or a statue bearing her image, but rather an opportunity for the work to continue. It is a responsibility to the work. We don't play theater, we make theater.

Jessica Love is a first-year drama student.