San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Radio keeping theater alive with its unique version of a play on words
Theater schools, drag troupes turn to radio to entertain during coronavirus pandemic
Static hisses. Hints of signals flicker then fizzle out. You can practically see a dial inching clockwise, then reversing course, hot on the trail of clear sound.
Then a voice pierces the fog: “You’re listening to WQUR: Queer Quarantine Radio.” A metallophone chimes four tones, echoed by four voices, one for each letter of the radio station. They harmonize and crescendo, cutting off snappily.
That audio sequence and its many ancestors feel baked into the American psyche, and even if you grew up long after the golden age of radio, the beginning of WQUR heralds comfort. The web creation of composer Major Scales, “RuPaul’s Drag Race” winner Jinkx Monsoon, “Drag Race” contestant BenDeLaCreme and drag performer Peaches Christ sounds like it’s going to take care of you, as if it already knows the corners of your abode, your past, your memory.
A current-day audience might feel tempted to write off radio theater as a poor substitute for in-person theater, with its rich visual tools, its live interaction with an audience. But in the coronavirus era, when we can’t gather in playhouses, radio drama can offer more than just a makeshift outlet for frustrated artists. It also sings anew of the unique pleasures it has afforded all along.
Queer Quarantine Radio embraces its old-school origins, with a murder mystery, detective noir and family sitcom, all serialized in short installments in each episode, but everything’s laden with sexual innuendo, including the jingles for fake ads — Maytag is “Gaytag.”
San Francisco public radio station KALW’s “Open Air,” hosted by David Latulippe, launched a series called Corona Radio Theater, featuring a different local theater company in a radio play each Thursday. The series began with short-story specialists Word for Word performing “Firelight” by Tobias Wolff; it proceeded with San Francisco Playhouse’s “Sorry, Wrong Number,” featuring Susi Damilano in the role Barbara Stanwyck made famous in the film adaptation of the radio play.
Degree-granting theater programs are also making use of audio theater, including the American Conservatory Theater’s MFA program, which performed Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s “Rough Magic” as an audio play.
University of California-Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies also presented Dustin Chinn’s “Snowflakes, or Rare White People,” directed by Mina Morita, as an audio play, accompanied by slides of what the production design would have looked like.
Radio can be a much more intimate and collaborative experience for audiences than even the most in-your-lap live theater.
“Someone posted the other day that they enjoyed the show while taking a bath,” says Peaches Christ of WQUR. “I was sort of taken aback, like, ‘That’s weird.’ Then I thought, ‘That’s wonderful.’ I don’t know that I’ve ever performed for someone taking a bath before.
“You can have this sort of experience with us in a very personal way. We’re in your ears, and we’re entertaining you, and we’re sharing imagination. We have to depend on them to imagine what we look like, what our costumes are like.”
Peaches Christ had been preparing to perform “Drag Becomes Her” with BenDeLaCreme and Jinkx Monsoon at the Castro Theatre when the outbreak hit. All the three’s other gigs for the foreseeable future were getting canceled at once as concerns over the pandemic continued.
“We started talking about, ‘Hey, we have this spare time. Maybe we should do something creative together that doesn’t involve a live audience,’ ” Christ recalls. On a group text, Scales broached the idea of a queered ’40s radio show.
For KALW’s Latulippe, Corona Radio Theater “came almost as a wake-up-in-the-middle-of-thenight idea,” he says. He was wondering, “How can we support local theater at this time of the COVID crisis? I thought, ‘Let’s do it by Zoom.’ ” His producer had contacts from all the theater companies Latulippe has interviewed since he began hosting the show in 2012. From there, a lineup began to form.
At UC Berkeley, Morita felt her undergrad actors “deserved and should have some sort of very safe community in this very challenging moment and also space to learn.” She wanted them to still be able to make something, to still have an experience akin to working with a production team to put on a show, but she wanted whatever form the final product took to be “attainable.”
She had to coach her actors — whose characters live in a future
where white people are a diorama exhibit in a natural history museum — much differently than she is accustomed to, though.
“I had to directorially go back through the entire script,” she says, looking for places where she had intended to communicate an idea physically, in staging, to figure out how sound could carry it. “Obviously, certain things like actions and intentions are the same,” she says. For instance, “How do you make it sound like like you’re leaning on a counter flirting with somebody, but that the lean is in the voice, as opposed to just the flirt?”
“You have to translate everything about the character into their voice,” says Scales, including all the traits that drag typically conveys with visual flamboyance: attitude, status, revelry with gender and sexuality, camp, glamour.
Even conveying basic information about a scene — who is onstage, who has left the stage — can be difficult without constant visual cues, and that was true even for the WQUR team, who wrote their scripts specifically for radio, in contrast to Chinn with “Snowflakes.”
But the four leaned into the difficulty, with delightful results: “Yes, I’m still here. I just haven’t spoken in a while.” “So, just to be clear, I, Agatha, am staying in this room, and you, my identical twin sister, Lorna, are leaving the room.”
Premiere date: May 29, 1950, BBC
This soap opera, about English farming families, was released with educational aims, to promote agricultural best practices amid postwar food rationing. It has since gone on to become not only the world’s longest-running radio soap opera, but also the longest-running soap opera of any sort. Still airing, it has now logged more than 19,000 episodes. Listen at https:// bit.ly/bbcthearchers
Premiere dates: Jan. 6, 2012, and March 16, 2012, “This American Life,” Public Radio International
When Mike Daisey adapted part of his solo show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” about what it’s like in Apple’s factories in China, for “This American
Life,” host Ira Glass introduced Daisey as an “amateur reporter” using “investigative techniques, once he gets going, I think, very few reporters would ever try, and finding lots of stuff I hadn’t heard or seen anywhere else.” There was no mention of artistic license.
The previous year, Daisey had performed the full solo show at Berkeley Rep. Later, NPR reporter Rob Schmitz revealed that parts of Daisey’s account had been embellished or fabricated. “This American Life” went on to retract the first episode, Glass explaining its decision and conducting a follow-up interview with Daisey in an episode called “Retraction,” an excruciating yet riveting conversation. The incident brought up vital questions about a storyteller’s responsibilities and whether and how those change from one medium to another. Listen at https://bit.ly/appleretraction