XL Arts

Heard any good plays lately? Watch the latest radio

By Elizabeth Cobbe
Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Video may have killed the radio star, but some Austin-area theater companies are bringing her back to life.

This fall, Salvage Vanguard Theatre takes their original sci-fi melodrama, the radio play "Intergalactic Nemesis," on a national tour. Before they head out of town, the company performs the entire Intergalactic trilogy in Austin, today through July 1, in what Salvage Vanguard artistic director Jason Neulander says will be its final Austin run.

"This is the most popular thing we've ever done," Neulander says. "You get the hipster crowd, you get parents with their kids, you get people who remember radio theater from its original days. I don't know any other play that can do that."

Buzz Moran has been Salvage Vanguard's foley artist (the person who performs the sound effects onstage with the actors) since the series' first performances in 1996. A lifelong fan of audio, he recalls holding up a handheld tape recorder to the radio to record shows such as "The Goon Show" on BBC when he was younger.

Visiting Moran's residence now is like touring a toy store. In fact, many of the sound effects came from a toy store to begin with.

"The sound effects are there just to aid the story," Moran says. "They're not there to dazzle anybody. They're there to give a place and a situation."

Some effects include the "brain whammy," a plot device which is actually a bright plastic tube he waves around in the air like a lasso to make a wobbly, whooshing sound. There's also the creak box: a wooden contraption with rope and some screws that sounds like an old, stubborn door if worked just right.

"Now we've got a whole other challenge taking ('Intergalactic Nemesis') on the road," Moran says. "It's hard to carry a couple of cinderblocks everywhere." He says they're asking the venues to provide those.

Salvage Vanguard isn't the only company in town getting their foley on. Austin Script Works produced 10 short radio plays written by member playwrights during the 2006 FronteraFest.

"I thought it would be a fun way to do our Out of Ink program that we've done for years that would be a real challenge for our members," says producing director Christina J. Moore.

Austin is also the hometown of the Violet Crown Radio Players, who stage original and adapted radio plays with four regular series ranging from comedy to horror. On Friday, they will perform some of their Sailor Steve Costigan material in Cross Plains at Robert E. Howard Days, a festival that this year celebrates the centennial of the pulp author's birth. The audio troupe will also take the stage at ArmadilloCon, a science fiction convention, in Austin in early August.

At each performance, Violet Crown recreates the classic radio era onstage. Actors dress up like actors from the 1930s, and the overburdened "director" sometimes gets into fights with the engineers.

When Violet Crown produced "War of the Worlds" in 2004, they didn't just mimic Orson Welles' original 1938 version, which portrayed the studio as so panicked that many Americans were duped into believing the story of Martians invading New Jersey. Violet Crown's aliens attacked Texas instead, and several local landmarks went up in flames.

"I got all kinds of interesting responses to it," says creative director Mark Finn. Everybody liked it, but responses varied from, 'I didn't realize the (original) show was supposed to be scary' to 'I really learned something new about 9/11.' "

"Austin is such a weird place that you can have people doing work in the same genre and they're not even competing," Moran says.

While radio theater has continued its life overseas on the BBC, in the United States, the genre has only recently started to attract listeners again.

New consumer technologies such as MP3 players are one big reason for the comeback. Many classic series such as "Fibber McGee and Molly" or "Buck Rogers" are currently available for download over the -Internet for free, offered out of love of the genre.

"Computer geeks can be really generous," Finn says.

"Podcasting is probably going to be the next big step," Moran says. "You're going to have a bunch of people saying, 'You know, let's not just do a podcast, let's do a show!' They might not know what they're doing and reinvent the genre."

Creating scripts from scratch comes its own challenges, too.

"There are a number of things you have to take into account," explains director and Violet Crown founder Toby Heidel. "When you're writing, most of your action is going to be staged there with notebooks and music stands. So you have to make it visually interesting for the audience in other ways."

"All of this gets back to, it's a simple medium," Finn says. "It's words in your head making stories. It's as close as you can get to reading."