CHILD OF THE SUN

Short on characterization and long on incident, this audio play dramatizes de Soto's sixteenth-century exploration of the American Southeast. The writing and production are comparable to the quality of a Hallmark TV special, with all the good and ill that that implies. Producer-writer Robert Clem romanticizes neither the Spanish nor the natives, though, in line with fashionable attitudes, he inclines toward blaming the former and going easy on the latter. Still, de Soto was no angel. What he was is not made clear here, only what he did, and this, producer Radio Action Theatre brings affectingly into the present tense. Y.R. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine [Published: AUG/SEP 98]