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Original director of the Workshop was Irving Reis, a swarthy, jittery onetime control-room engineer who thought the production, not the play, was the thing, and who sweated with oscillators, electrical filters, echo chambers to produce some of the most exciting sounds ever put on the air—Gulliver's voice, the witches in Macbeth, footsteps of gods, the sound of fog, a nuts-driving dissonance of bells, the feeling of going under ether. When Director Reis left the Workshop—which also graduated an even more celebrated member, Orson Welles—it was run for a time by handsome, long-armed William N. Robson, CBS staff director, who used such sound-effects as knifing a watermelon to sound like a stabbing. Later the Workshop became a laboratory for all of Columbia's crack directors. Reis, now a writer-director for Paramount in Hollywood, will direct three of the plays in the Festival; Robson, one. Most famed of the Workshop's plays. Archibald MacLeish's The Fall of the City, goes on the air September 28. Other good bets: an adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benét's John Brown's Body (July 20), and a bombing fantasy, They Fly Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease (September 7), both by Norman Corwin.