Theater: "The Late Night Radio Fest" at The Tank's PrideFest (Recap)

How odd it truly is to re-experience your own work anew. When I initially pitched The Strange Case of Nick M. to The Tank's PrideFest, I felt it was a long shot. Would curator Max Mooney actually be open to playing a recording -- originally broadcast on an Oregon radio station -- to a live, blindfolded audience in an off-off-Broadway venue? Upon learning that Max not only was game but wanted to know if I were open to a second evening, I proposed also "airing" my other radio play Price in Purgatory on Night 2. (Looking back, I wish I'd also shared my very first radio short The Land of Mystery created with Jennifer Allen and Miss Mugatroid as an opener for these two programs. Retrospective complete!) Once the line-up was approved, the questions shifted to: Would anybody come? (They did.) Would they be willing to don sleeping masks? (Very much so.) Would they be open to recognizing one seat buffers to create a safe space -- clearly demarked by signs that read "Please Sit Here" and "Don't Sit Here"? (No problem.) Would they feel shortchanged by a program that ran just under an hour? (I think not.) Maybe because "simply listening" (i.e., really leaning into the audio) takes energy, especially when the soundtrack is competing with a periodically loud show housed in the theater across the hall.

Listening to both productions myself after all these years, I was struck by how much I was waxing philosophical. For while The Strange Case... is dramatic, and Purgatory, farcical, each script obsesses about the particulars of identity. Who are we if not our memories? What are we if not a collection of impressions that we've gathered through our senses? What's more real than a movie? And do Juilliard graduates know the work of Clara Schumann? (Comic-violist Isabel Hagen was in attendance after all.) I thought the direction and the performances were quite good, and the sound design by Myrrh Larsen and Douglas Wagner quite exceptional. I'm so thankful to The Tank for giving this pair of recordings a fresh way to exist in the world as well as to the adventurous audience -- lured perhaps by my endless posts and stories on Instagram, the recommendations of Thought Gallery and City Guide, or the posts at Broadway World and Thinking Theater NYC -- who came for this unconventional experience. As for the writing, I have a few notes.

Above photo by Jarrod Campbell.