TNW play offers audience inside look

The sight of sound can be a theatre fan’s dream. In live theatre, they get to answer that eternal question: if a tree falls in a forest, and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound? At Theatre NorthWest, they will show you exactly how the metaphysics of eye and ear can play with your mind and how much fun that can be.

Our intuition tells us that the sounds heard during a play are sometimes created in an unseen place backstage. When the plot presents the audience with a storm, bright lights will flash to indicate lightning and there’s a clap of thunder. That boom was created by a trained sound technician (or an actor conscripted into the job because they weren’t on stage at the time and in theatre you have to do a thousand jobs) and of course it was somehow faked.

The golden age of sound effects came at us in waves – radio waves. The warm crackle of the family transistor brought live theatre into our homes. It brought famous voices, from Foster Hewitt calling Canada’s hockey games, to Don Messer’s fiddle turning us all into Islanders every week, to Orson Welles casting his shadow.

There was news on those radios, there was music, and there were so many plays. There was a War of the Worlds, there was a Man For All Seasons, there were superheroes and soap operas, Shakespeare and Beckett – it really was A Wonderful Life.

If only we could hear it all again.

But wait! (dramatic organ music)

At Theatre NorthWest we can! (ding-ding-ding, winner’s bell)

Not only that, at TNW we can even see it! (homerun crack of a bat, roar of the crowd)

All eyes and all ears will be on their holiday production of It’s A Wonderful Life, that heartwarming family story of a man who falls on hard times but with the help of an angel and some Christmas magic, he finds his way again.

The show is done as a radio play from the golden age, but there’s another play happening at the same time and we get to watch them both unfold – the familiar story we’ve loved of George Bailey and the angel Clarence, and also the hilarious interplay between the actors in the vintage radio studio where it’s being read into the microphones of a bygone era.

Off to the side, partly watching for her cues from the actors and partly bemused by the melodrama happening between the lines, is the frantically busy foley artist. In real radio plays, the foley artist is the one who has to make all the sound effects and music on the fly, when the script calls for a knock on a door or a flit of piano to emphasize the emotions of the story. In this TNW production, that is a real position that needs those real sound effects, but it is also a character mixed up in the banter.

Both (two in one) are played by Toronto theatre professional Jessie Fraser making her Prince George stage debut.

“There are times I’m playing something on the piano, reaching around behind me to make some kind of do-it-yourself noise, then switching hands to keep playing and stretch the other way to make some other sound… and figuring out how to do all that is part of the show for the audience. Everyone is watching me struggle. I think it’s funny, and I’m the one doing it, so I think the audience is going to get some laughs. Especially if I miss. Yeah. Funny. Haha,” said Fraser, with (sort of) fake nervousness.

“You know what sounds like ice cracking? Snapping celery in your hand. But it also sounds a lot like fire crackling, so we’re trying to decide how to best use celery,” she said, turning her kidding around to faux serious pondering. Again, though, it’s only partly facetious. The cast and crew really do have to come up with ways of making those sounds. Little effects hacks like snapping celery into a microphone are actually what they have to figure out. Because, as surprising as it sounds, the actual script for It’s A Wonderful Life: The Radio Play doesn’t explain these things.

“It’s a lot of trial and error and surprising ourselves,” Fraser said. “We will think we have an idea, but when we test it at the microphone it sounds different than the naked ear, so we have to go back to the drawing board. And sometimes we’ll just nail it, which is fun feeling.”

The foley artist profession got decimated by television in the same way the film developer’s profession got blacked out by digital cameras. It was a prized and deeply studied element of theatre, when radio plays were at their zenith. Finding information on do-it-yourself sound effects, even with Google and YouTube, is not as easy as it… sounds.

“There aren’t any cheat sheets for this play, and the online foley information is aimed more at the film industry,” said Fraser. “I’ve called a few of my sound effects friends and they always ask me the same question: what program are you using? This (holding out her two hands) is the program I’m using. I am using fingers, feet, elbows, whatever!, that is the program I’m using. This is all the old fashioned way.”

Since the script sets this play in the 1930s, the TNW cast and crew are sticking to the parameters of that age. Fraser’s foley table has to be stocked with the bells and whistles necessary for the sound effects, but they have to also be the bells and whistles that would have been available at that time.

“So, we can’t use plastic of any kind,” she said. “We can’t cheat and use something they wouldn’t have had back then. It’s a fun but aggravating challenge we have set for ourselves, to be era-appropriate with our tools.”

To see how they pull it off, watch It’s A Wonderful Life: The Radio Play at TNW starting Friday.