Not Your Mama’s
Radio Theatre
by Rhiana Yazzie
Two years ago I was lured into the craft
of writing audio plays because Native American Public
Telecommunications,
based in Lincoln, Nebraska, was asking for submissions
to begin their new Native Radio Theatre Project in November
2005. After seeing the notice, I vaguely recalled writing
a play about the great state of Nebraska when I was in
second grade. My teacher returned it to me all marked up
in red pen, correcting the local dialectical euphemisms
my main character—a turkey, I believe—used,
like “ain’t” to “isn’t” and “y’all” to “you
all.” But anyway, I digress; so after seeing the
call and walking down memory lane for a bit, I decided
to throw my hat into the ring and try my hand at creating
a radio/audio drama.
Put all notions aside about what you
may think a radio play is supposed to be. It is no longer
the pre-television
era, noir detective stories, vaudeville lunacy, or Prairie
Home Companion knock-offs one might be tempted to imagine.
Audio/radio theatre has come of age and is mature, sophisticated,
and sexy—well, as far as FCC rules can be sexy.
It is truly the medium of imagination. With great dialogue
and thoughtful sounds effects, one can literally fill
the
grand canyon with whipped cream. Statistics say that
people listen to more hours of radio each week than watch
TV.
No wonder; its market is expanding as radio stations
stream via the Internet and podcasts. And with the introduction
of satellite radio, there are new stations solely dedicated
to audio drama. So what other incentive did I need?!
I
submitted a Theatre for Young Audiences script I had
placed on the backburner, THE
Best Place to Grow Pumpkins.
It turns out that this very imaginative piece, which
may have been difficult to realize on the stage (because
of
directions that call for little things like a great
big pumpkin patch to grow from seed on command, a couple
of eensy earthquakes here and there and talking animals!),
was THE best match for audio. Winning the NAPT contest
meant I got to spend a whole week in the Ozarks—West
Plains, Missouri to be exact— to produce my script
at the annual Audio Theatre Workshop coordinated by
the National Audio Theatre Festivals based in New York
City.
The Audio Theatre Workshop is THE place where
audiophiles from around the country converge for a
week of audio
drama that culminates in a performance simultaneously
recorded
and broadcasted in front of a live studio audience.
Folks who attend run the gamut from audio theatre writers
to
radio station programmers, from audio documentary creators
whose résumés are filled with credits
from NPR to audio book producers and voice-over artists
like
Bill Dufris (Bob The Builder) and Simon Jones (Arthur
Dent of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)—both
of whom I had the sheer pleasure of casting in my plays!
That
year, my biggest challenge before getting to the conference
was figuring out how exactly to adapt my
stage play into
audio format. Because it truly is a genre of its own,
I was assigned a mentor to help with the task: radio
theatre
writer, director, producer, extraordinaire, and cohort
of the Sci-Fi Channel’s Seeing Ear Theatre, George
Zarr. Lesson number one was that audio scripts have
to be as clear as a score of sheet music. They must
be written
so that every person on the production crew, from actors
to sound effects folks, can quickly pick it up, understand,
and perform it even if it’s a cold reading. Especially
if it’s a cold reading!
And just how do you do
that you ask? Well, George introduced me to a little
known trademarked-copyrighted secret
art of “writing defensively.” They don’t
teach you that in grad school. This “technique” helps
an author to write precisely on the page the exact
results she wants in the actors’ characterizations.
Go figure.
This “writing defensively” approach
includes understanding the technical jargon for writing
sound effects
as well as using short, to-the-point parentheticals.
A simple example is in the first line of the script.
My central
character, Awee, says, “Are we there yet?” There
is a parenthetical direction for the actor to be “cranky.” However,
in the stage version, it wasn’t there because
of the unwritten law that says playwrights are supposed
have
faith—that their actors/director will eventually
figure out the emotional intent behind the words (not
surprisingly playwrights often feel like vomiting after
the very first
cold read of their scripts). In a readthrough of the
stage version the same line could be read “sleepily,” “angry,” “ADD-ish,”—anything
but “cranky.” And I do have to add that
after the very first readthrough of the audio version,
I was
actually smiling. A big smile.
After having a great
workshop and production at the conference last summer,
I was inspired to continue
writing in this
medium. Typically my plays blend satire and magic realism,
so writing in the audio theatre format has been a very
liberating experience. It may be that audio theatre
is to stage theatre what animation is to film.
I returned
to the Ozarks again this summer after winning the Native
Radio Theatre Project’s contest for a
second time. Sticking with another flora themed piece
that was so successful the year before, I wrote The
Peach Seed,
a story about a young girl who finds a 150-year-old
talking peach seed in the middle of the desert on the
Navajo reservation.
This year I got to sit in the driver’s
seat and the direct the play. Here’s another
little known secret in the audio theatre world: auteurs
rule! Unlike theatre-theatre,
in radio theatre there are no taboos against directing
your own work. In fact, it’s often expected.
Though it is essentially a collaborative art form,
audio theatre
can also be created alone in the privacy of your
own home with the right equipment. Hence the writer-as-director
phenomenon.
Most of the audio artists I’ve met wore more than
one hat, like my new directing mentor, Charles Potter,
who’s done everything from producing Grammy
award-winning spoken-word records to recording dramas
for the BBC. Many
others are a hybrid of sound installationists, storytellers,
and techies (who this summer at the festival all
simply went mad over a chance to record a live helicopter
take-off
and landing). Curiously, I have only met one other
playwright who made the crossover into this genre.
I don’t think
it’s any secret that my background in playwriting
is what laid the foundation for the success I’ve
been having with radio theatre. Though radio theatre
may require a bit more technological know-how, nothing
ever
beats a well-told and -structured play.
Today you
may occasionally run into radio dramas out there
that sound like transplants from the 1940s,
but
there are
also plays that use the medium to stretch the imagination
and take advantage of radio’s portability to
bring new stories to isolated communities. These
are the plays
and stories that are allowing audio theatre to keep
up with changes in technology and the audiences who
are downloading
audio drama onto their iPods. It is this relevance
and accessibility that will keep me interested in
exploring
the new-found land I stumbled into—to see just
how far the extension cord on my earphones will take
me.
—Rhiana Yazzie, a 2006-07 Jerome Fellow is a Navajo playwright
based in Minneapolis. She co-hosts the weekly radio
program WomenSpeak on KFAI.
The
Peach Seed will be podcasted through
AIROS.org this winter. |
