The play’s the thing … you listen to on a podcast
It’s what makes theatre unique, but also its catch-22: the performance happens in the moment and then it’s gone.
But what if it doesn’t have to disappear, thanks to digital technology?
This is the gambit of the PlayME podcast, the brainchild of Laura Mullin and Chris Tolley, co-artistic directors of Toronto’s Expect Theatre.
PlayME audio-records productions of contemporary Canadian plays and releases them in a series of 20- to 30minute episodes, followed by an indepth interview with the playwright. And by contemporary they mean up to the minute: podcasts of Hannah Moscovitch’s “Bunny” dropped on iTunes and other digital platforms while the stage production was still playing at Tarragon Theatre in March.
The success of the enterprise has taken Mullin and Tolley by surprise. Launched in 2016, PlayME podcasts have since had over 600,000 downloads in 90 countries. The reach is international: more than eight out of every 10 listeners are based outside of Canada.
“People all around the world are listening to
Canadian stories,”
Mullin says.
“There’s a hunger out there.”
While this form of engagement with theatrical content has its roots in radio drama, the PlayME approach offers some improvement on the older form, according to Tolley, because they’re recording existing productions.
“By the time people get in front of a mic, it’s been well crafted and the actors have the character in their bones,” he says. Radio drama, by contrast, tended to be “written for the recording,” with short rehearsal times.
While they started out focusing on indie productions, Mullin and Tolley have recently launched the PlayME Network: partnerships with established organizations including Factory Theatre, Musical Stage Company and Tarragon. Next year they’re going panCanadian, with plans to record productions at Artistic Fraud in St. John’s, N.L.; Ottawa’s Great Canadian Theatre Company and the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton.
More and more companies are jumping on board, Tolley says, in part “because our demographic is younger, in the 18 to 35 range. This is the crowd that theatres are trying to cultivate, the new audiences they’re trying to reach.”
“One of our concerns was that the theatre community might think we were competing with them, but they see it as the opposite,” Mullin says. “It’s a way to reach audiences … And for the playwrights and the artists, it’s another gig, to get down to economics.”
For playwright and director Kat Sandler, whose play “BANG BANG” went live on PlayME in February, the podcasts are an opportunity to reach “this whole group of people who have never and may never see the play.”
Sandler initially had questions about how listeners would receive “BANG BANG,” given that they could only hear what live audiences both heard and saw when the show was staged at Factory earlier this year.
“You find yourself wishing that you had the characters say each other’s names more,” she says.
Mullin and Tolley had similar worries: their first podcast (of Nicolas Billon’s “Agamemnon,” presented at the Toronto Fringe’s 2016 Next Stage Festival) included the stage directions read out loud, but Mullin says they’ve since dropped that convention. “It hampered the flow. It was very freeing to get rid of them. We have to go through this every time with the playwrights; they quickly realize you don’t have to explain everything.”
By having to imagine what’s happening physically, “you can create something in your mind that’s more powerful and quite often that builds tension,” Tolley says. “It’s an extra layer.”
PlayME functions as a mobile studio, renting space around town.
The show being recorded at a recent session is PlayME’s first musical endeavour: Musical Stage Company’s “Reframed,” three short musicals inspired by paintings in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s collection, originally performed at the AGO in 2016. Limited seating meant that the production sold out “in about five seconds,” says Musical Stage’s artistic director, Mitchell Marcus, so the company was eager to “have these works reach national and international audiences beyond the walls of any venue.”
Besides the national network, another new initiative this year is PlayME Mono, in which playwrights are interviewed before a live audience about a monologue from one of their plays; the monologue is also recorded and is part of the podcast. Participating writers include Judith Thompson, d’bi.young anitafrika, Keith Barker and Daniel MacIvor.
Mullin and Tolley founded Expect Theatre more than 20 years ago, creating shows that increasingly included audience/performer interaction and new technology, and they have also worked in short film production.
For them, PlayME is an unexpected, welcome culmination.
“It feels so right for us, “Tolley says. “All of a sudden our winding journey makes sense.”