Making theater for the ears
Playwrights are pairing with audiobook company Audible
NEWARK, N.J. – An office tower in this gritty Northeastern city seems an unlikely nerve center for theatrical inspiration. Yet here, in the sky-high studios of Audible, the audiobook and audio entertainment company, a new model for bringing drama to the people is taking shape.
Through the window of an Audible control booth on a recent weekday afternoon, you could watch as two highly regarded actresses, Kate Mulgrew and Francesca Faridany, stood near each other at microphones to recite the lines of a new play, Lauren Gunderson’s “The HalfLife of Marie Curie.” A few days later, just across the Hudson, in cozy Minetta Lane Theatre, which Audible leases as its off-Broadway home, you could settle in to a performance in the six-week run of “The Half-Life of Marie Curie” — produced by Audible too.
It’s not that plays are new to recordings, or that corporations never before invested in the stage. What is novel is how this company is commissioning dramatists to write plays for its global listener base and at the same time curating them for a narrower market of theatergoers.
You might say that Audible is assembling a digital repertory company, with platforms both on-air and on legs. (Launched a quarter-century ago, Audible was acquired in 2008 by Amazon, whose chief executive, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.)
“My wife is seriously smart about theater, and we go a couple of times a week,” Audible’s founder and chief executive, Donald Katz, said in an interview. “When I saw what was happening, that the next generation of plays was being written to an intimate aesthetic, I realized there was the capacity to customize the experience to the power and intimacy of the human voice.”
As a result, Audible embarked on a mission to archive and create new work, much of it in the form of solo or small-cast pieces, and offer them to subscribers, who number in the millions (the company declines to provide detailed data). An artistic producer came aboard in March 2017: Kate Navin, a former agent who, with a small team of producers, began the task of building a theater collection.
The company’s theatrical aspirations, according to Navin, prompted a natural migration to the stage, with a twofold thesis: “That theater artists are underutilized, and there is a product model that we can use to fix that a little bit.” The model has resulted in a burgeoning role off-Broadway for Audible, which has given commissions to 25 playwrights since 2017, with 10 more to be awarded in the coming months. A few judged especially stageworthy have been selected for live production, such as “The Half-Life of Marie Curie,” in the 400-seat Minetta Lane.
Works from other theaters have been preserved in Audible recordings as well: Billy Crudup, for instance, performed David Cale’s solo show, “Harry
Clarke,” at Minetta Lane in 2017 after a successful run at offBroadway’s Vineyard Theatre. And Carey Mulligan arrived in 2018 with Dennis Kelly’s onehander, “Girls and Boys,” after its sold-out engagement at London’s Royal Court Theatre. Some of the special events are recorded live in the performance space, so audience reaction can be part of the recording.
“The Half-Life of Marie Curie,” the sixth work for which Audible is sole stage producer, is
Gunderson’s account of a wrenching period in the life of the discoverer of radium who was twice awarded the Nobel Prize. At the height of her fame in the early 20th century, she became embroiled in a public scandal in Paris over her affair with a married man. As pointed out in Gunderson’s tale of the spirit-reviving friendship between Faridany’s Marie and Mulgrew’s Hertha Ayrton, an acclaimed British physicist, the outsize abuse heaped on Curie seemed driven by misogyny.
Gunderson said writing primarily for audio consumption struck her as challenging, “but the overall goal was revolutionary. British audiences are used to radio drama, but in American culture not at all. This takes the ‘local’ out of the theater experience, which is a good thing. People anywhere can be in the room with the characters I created.”
Engineers may have their hands on the soundboard dials, but Audible likes having a stage director’s fingers all over the production. In this case, Navin hired Gaye Taylor Upchurch, who has worked at major theater companies all across the country to direct both the audio and stage version of the play.
“It’s a different way of working,” Upchurch said, during a break in the Audible recording session. The day before, in a rehearsal room in Manhattan, she was frequently out of her chair, conferring in a whisper with Faridany or Mulgrew, to refine some movement or note the desired impact of a lighting effect. In Newark, her only contact with the performers was over a loudspeaker. “When I’m in the studio,” she said, “I try not to watch the actresses. I want to make sure I’m getting it just through my ears.”
Navin said her team felt upon reading Gunderson’s finished version that it would be “playable” — that it would work in front of a crowd. “You can just tell when you read a script,” Navin observed. But, as the playwright noted, not everything in a work of drama is playable on a recording.
“There are a few moments in the stage production that do not translate for the audio production,” Gunderson said. “Basically, it’s an entirely silent scene, a little moment at the end of the play, with Marie holding her radium. It is an internal moment, a kind of dangerous moment that if you listened to it would just be silent, with the sound of (radium) ticking.”
How that would be handled on the audio version was still under discussion. On the Minetta Lane stage, the scene unfolds just as Gunderson described. “It’s a gift to the people in the room,” she said.
Meaning that occasionally, even with a drama designed for the ears, the eyes have it.