Recommended Reading: The Radio Drama Handbook

 
One thing aspiring audio theater producers will discover very quickly is how few instructional resources are available to them. Visit any library or bookstore and you'll find dozens of books on filmmaking, music production, painting, and other methods of creating art. But the withering of audio as a storytelling medium (in the U.S., at least) also resulted in a withering of writing about audio.

Which is not to say there's absolutely nothing out there, of course. Back when Chatterbox was in its planning stages I got an immense amount of help from several online resources, as well as a couple of excellent books. (I'm planning to collect a list of these resources for a future blog entry.) But if you're as hungry for information and ideas as I was, your reading list can look depressingly small.

Happily, up-and-coming audio dramatists now have another essential resource in Richard J. Hand and Mary Traynor's The Radio Drama Handbook. Released in 2011, this up-to-date, eminently readable how-to book is a perfect jumping-off point for anyone interested in creating their own work of audio theater. It's also packed with enough theory, recommendations, and practical considerations to interest more serious listeners and fans.

The Radio Drama Handbook opens with a concise but fascinating history of radio itself, as well as the storytelling form that evolved to take advantage of the new medium. From there, the authors move through radio drama theory (including considerations of how people listen, the tools available to radio dramatists, and more) and contemporary production companies (including Chatterbox) before taking a nuts-and-bolts look at how to create radio drama, from writing all the way through recording.

I've been actively creating radio drama since 2007, so a good portion of the material here was familiar to me. Another good portion was not, of course, and I came away from the book feeling like I'd learned a great deal. But even the familiar stuff was a pleasure to read. As someone who learned largely by jumping in and figuring things out as I went, I particularly appreciated the structure of the material. Not only did it confirm for me that Chatterbox's methods and philosophies are generally solid (whew), the book helped me to experience some of the information I've picked up randomly, over a five-year span, in an organized, contextualized manner. Plus it's just fun to read about stuff you enjoy.

By far, one of my favorite things about the book was the way it filled out my listening list. Like Leonard Maltin's The Great American Broadcast, The Radio Drama Handbook leaves you eager to dig into all the great shows you've just read about. Authors Hand and Traynor are extremely well-versed in contemporary audio productions, and the list of shows they consider spans the BBC and other professional companies as well as a wide range of independent producers. More in-depth considerations are presented as chapter-long "case studies" (such as a thoughtful look at We're Alive, a show whose praises I've sung in this very space). But throughout, the book is packed with intriguing descriptons of pieces that are now at the top of my listening list. What audio producer or fan wouldn't be interested to hear A Pot Calling the Kettle Black, a dialogue-free production in which "the listener is transported away from the humdrum kitchen to a spectacular parallel universe, one which is created in the imagination, a universe unique to each listener"?

As I mentioned, the authors were kind enough to include Chatterbox in their look at contemporary audio theater production companies. Professor Hand interviewed Kyle, Marques, and me about our process, our methods, and our philosophies. So am I recommending this book a simply because we're in it? Not in the least. While I admit that it's fun to be reading along and suddenly encounter your own name, the book stands on its merits as an excellent overview—and celebration—of audio storytelling.

You can order The Radio Drama Handbook directly from the publisher or from Amazon, among other retailers. It's worth the relatively high price tag. If you're serious about radio drama / audio theater -- whether as a producer, performer, or listener -- this one should absolutely be on your shelf.

Chatterbox in the Classroom!

 School sure was serious business back in the day.

Today we have a guest entry from Lisa Marie Carpenter, a teacher in the Susquehanna Community School District in Pennsylvania. Lisa uses the Chatterbox productions of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and Rip Van Winkle in her classroom, and we couldn't be happier about that. Lisa:

I use Chatterbox audios in my 7th grade English classroom. I find that they help my students relate to the characters and become interested in the literature that they are adapted from. The audios are always interesting and my students enjoy listening to them and gaining the background knowledge before they read a story.

As a teacher, I have found the free educational guides very helpful in planning my lessons. In addition, I wrote to Chatterbox to ask for the script version to use with my drama unit. I was sent the script very promptly and am sure that they will only continue to benefit my students. I would recommend Chatterbox to any teacher looking to liven up a lesson and keep their students interested. Excellent work!

Are you a teacher who finds our work helpful in your classroom? If so, drop us a line and let us know! We'd love to hear from you.

Report from the Open House

Like most of us, Aiden got into audio theater for the babes.

Earlier this week, we hosted our second Open House in the Chatterbox Studio. It was great fun, with a crowd of about 60 friendly faces. Everyone had a chance to get on mic and to play with sound effects equipment (which was especially fun for the young'uns who attended). And of course there was food and drink and great camaraderie throughout the evening. You can see photos from the Open House on the Chatterbox website.

Events like these remind me how much Chatterbox depends on its community in order to succeed. Our little theater requires directors, actors, writers, musicians, sound effects artists, sound engineers, visual artists, Board members, administrators, donors, and of course listeners. Without every single one of those elements in place, we couldn't do what we do.

If I weren't busy with Chatterbox, I like to imagine I'd spend my free time hunkered down in a basement somewhere, working on a the Great American Novel. Which would be fun, sure -- if nothing else, I could smoke a pipe and wear jackets with elbow patches -- but would also be a fairly solitary endeavor. Meanwhile, in four years of Chatterbox, we've worked with about 220 people in the creation of our shows, and thousands more listen in each month. I'm certainly the richer for it, and I hope all our participants can say the same.

So, no matter how you participate in Chatterbox, thank you! And whether or not you made the Open House, mark your calendar for our next event: a live Halloween broadcast on WKNO-FM, part of the Transcontinental Terror collaboration. More details soon.

A Glimpse into My Inbox

 That has to be the longest steering column I've ever seen.

One of the consistently amazing things about Chatterbox is its global reach -- the fact that the work we do here in Memphis can affect a listener hundreds of miles away. And the fact that said listener can then turn around and communicate back with us almost instantly.

This mind-boggling thought struck me anew as I was looking over my inbox yesterday evening. At the moment, I've got 16 emails flagged as needing a response. They include:

- Four sketch submissions from a comedy writer in the UK
- A networking email from an audio theater producer in Long Island, NY
- An email from our friend Mariele of the great Wireless Theatre Company (in London) about this year's Halloween collaboration
- An email about the possibility of Chatterbox performing at the Memphis ComicCon
- A networking email from another UK-based theater company (Blackshaw Productions)
- An awesome Halloween Show script from Memphis writer Deborah Hyatt (which we're totally going to use)
- An email from Geneva Community Radio in Geneva, NY about airing our shows (Woot!)
- A suggestion from a listener in MN about a book he thinks would make a good adaptation
- A theater student from Macedonia (!) inquiring about the possibility of performing one of our scripts in area classrooms
- Notice of a monthly donation from a generous new donor (Thanks, Nathan!)

What an array! It's amazing, and humbling, that our work has entered the online conversation enough to inspire such communications. When our mission statement says we hope to "advance the exchange of ideas," this is exactly the kind of thing we're talking about. Exactly.

Anyway, long live the internet! Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some emails to answer.

On Post-Production

 Alla Bartoshchuk's amazing artwork for Markheim.

This month, Chatterbox will be releasing two diametrically opposite shows. The first, Markheim, is already available for streaming and download from our website. The second, our live performance of The Bremen Town Musicians, will be posted later in the month.

The differences are numerous. One show is dark and serious; one is light and fun. One was recorded in an intimate studio setting; one was recorded live, with audience interaction. And one of them definitely does not feature the song "I'm Just a Honkey-Tonk Donkey."

More to the point of today's post, however, The Bremen Town Musicians will be available within a month of its recording, whereas Markheim was recorded in April of 2010, more than a year ago. Why do some of our shows have extended post-production schedules, while others are turned around almost immediately?

It happens for a lot of reasons. One is the recording technique. Our live shows typically don't get much post-production. Everything has to be carefully set up on the front end, and whatever happens during the performance is generally what ends up on the site. (As a perfectionist, some of the flubs in our live shows drive me crazy. [Especially my own.] But it's also part of those shows' charm.) Because a lot of our live shows are mixed down to stereo as we're recording them -- as opposed to studio shows, where we can keep each performance separated onto its own audio track -- we don't have nearly as many editing options.

Now, to be clear, none of our shows get that much editing in post. We don't assemble our shows, e.g. taking lines from three different takes and cobbling them together. No matter the setting, all of our actors are always in the same room with one another, and the interaction you hear is genuine. Still, studio shows leave much more room for polishing. We'll go back and re-record flubbed lines, for instance, and cut out the flub in post. Not so with a live recording, where again, whatever happens -- happens.

That's one reason some shows take longer than others. Additionally, even after they're finished, shows like Markheim sometimes get held back to make room for shows that need to be posted on a schedule. Our Halloween and Christmas offerings are the most obvious examples. On Halloween night, we present our live performance on WKNO-FM. We like to post the performance to the website within a week or so of Halloween, when people are still in the mood for something scary. We also try to turn our Children's Theatre Festival shows around pretty quickly as well, in order to capitalize on the excitement from those who attended. Shows like Markheim (which is, admittedly, set on Christmas Day) are handy because they can be posted at any time of year.

Finally, we're just darn busy. Our intrepid producers rarely finish recording a show before I'm recruiting them to record another. They also have jobs, lives, and gigs with other theaters. (The nerve!) So, projects sometimes get shelved because there's simply no time to work on them.

Since most of our fans don't know what we've got up our sleeves until it shows up on the site, the people who suffer the most from long post-production times are those involved in the shows. I've repeatedly assured our Markheim cast that there was nothing wrong with the show or their performances; the recording didn't require any major surgery. It just necessarily got put on the back burner as we renovated and opened our studio, presented a couple of live shows, and got caught up in the holidays. In the meantime, everyone got older, and some things changed, like Markheim lead actor Randal Cooper relocating to Nashville.

Part of what makes these recordings so powerful for me is that they're a snapshot of a particular moment in time -- a record of the people we were, and the people we were with. I think the Markheim cast will enjoy re-discovering this show and thinking back to the rehearsal and recording process last year. More poignantly, after the loss of wonderful people like Ralph Hatley and Laurie Cook McIntosh, having all these talents on record seems like an incredible gift.

So there's a little peek behind the curtain at the two shows you'll hear from us this June. Regardless of their differences, I sincerely hope you'll enjoy them both.

On Selecting Shows

 

One question I'm asked fairly frequently is: "How do you pick which shows Chatterbox records?" Which often translates as: "You just did a Jack London story and now you're doing a Greek myth. What's the thought process here?" With lots of ideas and very limited resources, it's definitely a balancing act, though often an enjoyable one. Here's an attempt to explain the philosophy behind our show selection.

First, and probably most obviously, it's subjective. There's no science behind it. There are hundreds of scripts out there that might make for a great recording -- scripts that another audio group might jump on in a heartbeat. But if, for whatever reason, the story doesn't grab any of us, we pass. Adapting, casting, scheduling, rehearsing, recording, editing, and posting a show takes a tremendous amount of work, and if we're not excited about it on the front end, chances are we'll never make it through. So any show we pick has to be particularly enticing to us from the outset for one reason or another, whether it's the content, the technical challenges involved, the casting opportunities it presents, or something else entirely.

Who is the "us" in the previous paragraph? Well, even though as Executive Director I give the ultimate thumbs-up or thumbs-down, I also like to decentralize the selection process as much as possible. I've never wanted Chatterbox to reflect only my tastes and my sensibilities. To that end, I work closely with Artistic Director Kyle Hatley to brainstorm ideas for shows. (Kyle also writes and directs his own shows, mostly independently of my involvement, which is not something I'd trust just anybody to do.) Marques and Dave are also usually involved to some extent. And we've got an excellent group of independent readers who look over all submissions we receive and make recommendations as to which ones may fit with our priorities and preferences.

Did you catch that? Yes, Chatterbox accepts script submissions. You can pitch us your idea (or your existing script) by using the Contact page on the Chatterbox website. But what are the Inner Sanctum, the Readers' Circle, and I looking for in a script? Here are a few important qualities:

1. Free. We don't have a lot of money, so we steer clear of any stories that involve copyright or licensing fees. It's complicated, expensive, and time-consuming. Plus most lawyers' heads would probably explode trying to figure out a fair price. ("It's online? And free? Forever?" [SFX: LOUD BANG]) So, we stick to original works (where we have express permission from the author) or works that have fallen into the public domain and are no longer under copyright. Since that latter category includes most stories written before the 1920s, we've still got centuries of material to choose from.

2. Meaty. Chatterbox's mission statement says that our work is intended to "enlighten, entertain, and inspire." Sure, some of our shows lean more toward pure entertainment (I'm looking at you, Sight Gag). But in general, we like to take on works that offer some kind of artistic or intellectual nourishment. Something with some meat to it. Heck, look at some of the heavyweight authors we've taken on: Melville, Kafka, Joyce, Verne, Stevenson, Hawthorne, Sophocles. (Those last three are upcoming shows, by the way, so you won't find them on the site just yet.) There's nothing wrong with lighter shows, but to paraphrase Edward Albee, we think that if you're going to spend hours of your time listening to a story, there should be some danger that you'll end up transformed by it.

3. Fresh. On a similar note, check out the Chatterbox show listings. You won't find a single noir piece, campy soap opera, or sci-fi comedy a la The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Why not? Well, there's nothing wrong with any of these genres, but practically every audio theater troupe out there (and there aren't many of us) already does them. Some do them extremely well, but with all respect to our colleagues, we feel that there are just too many other genres to explore. And personally, I don't like the implication that audio is inherently tied to mid-20th-century America, and that we can no longer do anything new with it. While the stories we record aren't always new (in fact, some are hundreds of years old), we certainly hope they bring something new to the table.

4. Reasonable. Your 500-page audio script tracing the lives and loves of six generations of the Galloway family was beautiful. It really was. But there's just no way we can take on something of that scope, not with the limited resources I mentioned earlier. While we don't shy away from richly imagined, ambitious shows (see Dead and Gone, Pinocchio, or our annual Halloween Shows, to name a few), there's a logistical line we simply can't cross. So if the script calls for 150 characters and enormously complicated effects, we probably won't be able to do it justice.

5. Exciting. And that brings us back to the X factor that I was talking about above. Each script we select has some quality that speaks to one of us. We can't always explain what it is. I can't always tell you why we adapted this story rather than that when both are from the same author or both address the same basic themes. Some shows just speak to you, that's all. And when a show speaks to one of us, it has a much better chance of speaking to one of you.

So, there you have it: a subjective and entirely unscientific explanation of why we produce what we produce. Together, it adds up to a very particular -- and, I hope, unique -- voice.