FOREWORD
Years ago, when I was 7 and 8 and 9, my
family piled into the station wagon for weekend-long road trips,
and as we rolled down one interstate after another, we listened to
cassettes of old-time radio shows, like The Shadow , Suspense , Fibber McGee and Molly , and Abbot and Costello . I knew then, riding in the dark, huddled
in the backseat, alone, connected, adrift in the worlds’ of
children’s imaginations from 30 and 40 years before, that this was
what I wanted to do with my life. Being a child of the 1970’s, I’d
grown up on television, video games, and Star Wars, but nothing had
so captured my imagination as these old shows, crackling through
the void, through time. I wanted to write, direct, produce and star
in old-time radio shows.
“But son” my father dutifully explained,
“they don’t do radio drama anymore, they haven’t done it since
before I was a kid.”
One of the thrills of my life has been to
prove him wrong. In 1996, I was fortunate enough to land at
SCIFI.COM, where I founded Seeing Ear Theatre ( www.scifi.com/set )
My goal has been to provide a home for
new-time expressions of audio drama. To use new plays, new stories
to turn on a whole new audience to this art form.
But why audio drama? Why not just do stage
plays, or TV programs, or better yet, films…? The power of the
audio drama is unique among electronic forms of story-telling. It’s
power is felt on a deeply personal level – the act of listening is
more similar to the act of reading than it is to watching. When you
curl up with a good book, you give birth to the world and the
characters that inhabit that world. They belong to you. When you
read, you are engaged in a creative process, but when you go to see
a film, or watch TV, you sit passively, digesting some else’s
vision, someone else’s world… Imagine for a moment teaching this
classroom exercise: Ask the students to listen to a bit of The
Shadow , and then ask them to do a drawing of the lead
character. You will get 25 different pictures, all of them right,
all of them individual creations. Now play a clip from one of their
favorite TV shows, The Simpsons for example, and ask them to
draw a picture of Bart Simpson, and you will get 20 different
representations of what’s already there on the screen, some of them
better than others, better copies of what they see. One exercise is
a creative act, the other is not. The imagination is like a muscle;
if we fail to inspire it to exercise, it will atrophy, become limp,
and useless.
In 1998 I picked up a copy of Neil Gaiman’s
short story collection Smoke And Mirrors , and was instantly
drawn to “ Murder Mysteries .” As I read I could hear the play
unfolding in its myriad layers. I could imagine the rich sonic
possibilities of creating the sounds of the City of Angels. What
does the Hall of Being feel like, and what of the squadron of
Lucifer’s angels practicing their war games – what do they sound
like? But even more than the sound possibilities, I was drawn,
hooked by Neil’s use of two narrators to tell the story. From the
beginning of the medium, radio drama has relied (sometimes too
frequently) on the role of the narrator, the truthsayer guiding us
through the story, holding our hands. But not here, not in Murder Mysteries . Neil plays with our sense of trust, our
sense of complacency… He yanks us back and forth between two
tellers, never letting us get too comfortable with either one.
We recorded the voices Murder
Mysteries in one long day in the summer of 1998, then I went
home and crashed, wondering if we’d got it all, hoping that we’d
done justice to the play… Brian Dennehy, who plays Raguel, the
Angel of Vengeance, was deep into his Tony-Award winning turn as
Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman . I can only imagine how
exhausted he was after that particular evening’s performance. I
then spent two weeks at John Colucci, my sound designer’s house,
living,
Years ago, when I was 7 and 8 and 9, my
family piled into the station wagon for weekend-long road trips,
and as we rolled down one interstate after another, we listened to
cassettes of old-time radio shows, like The Shadow , Suspense , Fibber McGee and Molly , and Abbot and Costello . I knew then, riding in the dark, huddled
in the backseat, alone, connected, adrift in the worlds’ of
children’s imaginations from 30 and 40 years before, that this was
what I wanted to do with my life. Being a child of the 1970’s, I’d
grown up on television, video games, and Star Wars, but nothing had
so captured my imagination as these old shows, crackling through
the void, through time. I wanted to write, direct, produce and star
in old-time radio shows.
“But son” my father dutifully explained,
“they don’t do radio drama anymore, they haven’t done it since
before I was a kid.”
One of the thrills of my life has been to
prove him wrong. In 1996, I was fortunate enough to land at
SCIFI.COM, where I founded Seeing Ear Theatre ( www.scifi.com/set )
My goal has been to provide a home for
new-time expressions of audio drama. To use new plays, new stories
to turn on a whole new audience to this art form.
But why audio drama? Why not just do stage
plays, or TV programs, or better yet, films…? The power of the
audio drama is unique among electronic forms of story-telling. It’s
power is felt on a deeply personal level – the act of listening is
more similar to the act of reading than it is to watching. When you
curl up with a good book, you give birth to the world and the
characters that inhabit that world. They belong to you. When you
read, you are engaged in a creative process, but when you go to see
a film, or watch TV, you sit passively, digesting some else’s
vision, someone else’s world… Imagine for a moment teaching this
classroom exercise: Ask the students to listen to a bit of The
Shadow , and then ask them to do a drawing of the lead
character. You will get 25 different pictures, all of them right,
all of them individual creations. Now play a clip from one of their
favorite TV shows, The Simpsons for example, and ask them to
draw a picture of Bart Simpson, and you will get 20 different
representations of what’s already there on the screen, some of them
better than others, better copies of what they see. One exercise is
a creative act, the other is not. The imagination is like a muscle;
if we fail to inspire it to exercise, it will atrophy, become limp,
and useless.
In 1998 I picked up a copy of Neil Gaiman’s
short story collection Smoke And Mirrors , and was instantly
drawn to “ Murder Mysteries .” As I read I could hear the play
unfolding in its myriad layers. I could imagine the rich sonic
possibilities of creating the sounds of the City of Angels. What
does the Hall of Being feel like, and what of the squadron of
Lucifer’s angels practicing their war games – what do they sound
like? But even more than the sound possibilities, I was drawn,
hooked by Neil’s use of two narrators to tell the story. From the
beginning of the medium, radio drama has relied (sometimes too
frequently) on the role of the narrator, the truthsayer guiding us
through the story, holding our hands. But not here, not in Murder Mysteries . Neil plays with our sense of trust, our
sense of complacency… He yanks us back and forth between two
tellers, never letting us get too comfortable with either one.
We recorded the voices Murder
Mysteries in one long day in the summer of 1998, then I went
home and crashed, wondering if we’d got it all, hoping that we’d
done justice to the play… Brian Dennehy, who plays Raguel, the
Angel of Vengeance, was deep into his Tony-Award winning turn as
Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman . I can only imagine how
exhausted he was after that particular evening’s performance. I
then spent two weeks at John Colucci, my sound designer’s house,
living,
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