Dramaturgy 101: Going Live w/ Radio Theatre

Welcome back to Dramaturgy 101! As Encore rolls out our line-up of virtual Spring classes and camps, we’re excited to continue to bring creativity and storytelling into the lives of our students, families, friends, and community. This month, we’re excited to debut our Radio Drama classes with our Artistic Director Susan Keady. Susan will be leading an ensemble of performers in a virtual class focusing on the production and performance of radio plays.

Radio drama first started gaining popularity in the 1920s. As more people could afford radios in their living rooms, the demand for programming beyond news announcements grew. In 1922, Station WGY in Schenectady, New York, began producing weekly staged readings of plays. Soon, major radio stations all over the country began producing readings of plays with live music, sound effects, and troupes of actors. Many people who would later be pioneers of film and television, like both Ethel and Lionel Barrymore, Lucille Ball, and Rod Serling, got their start writing, performing, and producing radio plays.

By the early thirties, artists were writing plays specifically for the radio, taking into consideration specific qualities of radio that made it different from live theatre. One such radio drama, the 1924 French play Marémoto (“Seaquake”) by Gabriel Germinet and Pierre Cusy staged a soundscape of a realistic sinking ship before revealing that the characters were all actors in a theatre rehearsing a play. The play ran popularly in Germany and England but was banned in France until 1937 because the government feared ships would mistake the dramatic SOS messages in the opening sequence for actual distress signals. By using sound to set the realistic scene of a sinking ship, Gabriel and Cusy bring the audience into the emotion of that moment and make it real for them. Then, the actors break the audience’s illusion of this heightened moment of danger by bringing them suddenly into a very different space: a rehearsal. Not only was the twist exciting for audiences, who were used to receiving their drama exclusively on stages, but it tells us about the close connection between radio and theatre. Both are largely performed live and radio, unlike theatre at the time, had a unique ability to reach everyone regardless of where they lived or whether they could afford sometimes-expensive live theatre tickets. Radio also allowed artists to present music, stories, poetry, drama, and other work directly to thousands of families and individuals around the country all at once. It was simultaneously able to be mass-marketed and still feel personally moving.

In the late 2000s, the rise of online music streaming services like iTunes, Pandora, and Spotify created a familiar opportunity for writers, comedians, playwrights, and independent producers: the advent of podcasts. These platforms provided a public place where artists could produce their work to a large audience and make an income off of that audience’s engagement with their work. An individual with an idea and a microphone had the same opportunity as established radio stations to share their work with a potential audience consisting of anyone who had an internet connection. As podcasts have entered the mainstream, they’ve grown more diverse than ever and many rely on playwrights and actors who also work in television, films, and theatre to bring stories to life for their audiences. Some dramatic podcasts today revive old radio dramas or recreate them to celebrate the roots of the form.

With Susan Keady, winner of a 1996 Peabody Award for directing the radio show Kinetic City Super Crew , students will have the opportunity to explore a new (old) form of dramatic performance. Together, we’ll explore historical and modern radio drama scripts and build the foundations of vocal performance, script work, storytelling, and audience engagement. We’re so excited to share this opportunity to develop skills in producing and performing in radio.

In addition to Susan’s courses in radio drama, Encore is offering a robust line-up of programming for our Spring session. Classes for Grades 6-8 and 9-12 begin as early as next Thursday, April 16. Classes for Grades K-5 pick up starting in May, so now is the time to get signed up and invite all of your friends to join you before enrollment is full!

Photos by A.K. Nell, Aileen Pangan Christian, Shannon McCarthy, and Cindy Kane Photography.
Blog contribution by 2019/2020 Production Apprentice Kyla McLaughlin.
Edited by Shannon McCarthy.

Dramaturgy 101: Going Live w/ Radio Theatre

Encore Stage & Studio

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