With the coronavirus pandemic shutting down live performance across the world, theaters have been seeking to find ways to keep the arts (and their own venues) alive through alternatives. Zoom has been a popular platform, along with various modes of internet streaming. But some producers and theater-makers have seen the value of turning to an old art form, the radio drama.
Adam Greenfield, artistic director for Playwrights Horizons, has recently commissioned a series of “radio” plays for a podcast called Soundstage, which can now be found online. Mandy Greenfield (no relation to Adam) who runs the Williamstown Theatre Festival, inspired by podcasts, is in the process of taking seven plays scheduled for production and transforming them into audio dramas with partner, Audible. In the UK, 81-year-old playwright/producer Sir Alan Ayckbourn was quick to take a play, Anno Domino, scheduled for production in his Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, transforming it to an audio drama, now available online. Intar Theater and the Cherry Lane Theater are among others who have been producing audio plays. Follow this link to find out more.
Before television the radio play was a standard form of entertainment. The plays were written so that the dialogue, music and sound effects would enable listeners to imagine the action of the story. Probably one of the most famous radio plays of that long-ago era is Orson Welles’ adaptation of “The War of the Worlds,” which was so realistic that many listeners believed that Martians had landed on earth. And while radio drama has largely disappeared in the US, it still retained fans who kept the genre alive via old-time radio stations, and who listened to broadcasts principally in the UK and other foreign markets. But recently, even before the pandemic, there’s been a resurgence of interest in audio drama via podcasts and internet distribution––another instance of something old being new again.
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