Since June 2011 Leslie Law has been leading a gang of musicians, actors, and technicians in producing a series of quarterly podcasts. The latest episode of Sandbox Radio Live! was recorded Monday evening before a live audience at West of Lenin. The meat of these shows is theatre but each episode also features music and poetry, though the lines between these get blurry.
The show is well rehearsed. The Sandbox Artists Collective makes the enormous technical difficulties of organizing actors, live sound effects, and music into one fluid and balanced recording seem easy.
Aside from the technical achievements the music is far and away the strongest piece of this collaboration. Music Director José “Juicy” Gonzales leads on piano with five-string bass, drums, and clarinet doubling on accordion. Ms. Law chimes in on keyboard while keeping the show on track as producer. The band provides the through line for the production with effective underscoring and an inclination for funk when the music is able to take the focus.
The acting, by a who’s who of the Seattle theatre insiders drama club, is more than adequate. However the live sound effects are more ambitious than effective. The cast does good footfalls, doors, and drawers but the more liquid sounds of air, water, and breaking glass lack nuanced fluidity.
The radio format offers both the production company and the audience some unique opportunities. The actors, many of whom are approaching a time of diminishing casting opportunities, are freed from types to play as widely as their voices will take them.
For the audience it’s a backstage pass. We watch the actors appear as themselves even as they deliver a vast array of characters into the microphones. We also get an inside view of the making of radio theatre. Occasional flubs in the show remind the audience that we are not watching a performance so much as participating in the creation of a performance. We have our part to play and the Episode 7 audience gamely laughed at the same jokes when they were repeated for a clean take to be spliced over the mistakes in post-production.
For the playwrights, the absence of visuals can slow pacing as one sound follows another instead of occurring simultaneously with visuals. For the most part the limitations seem to encourage experimentation with form and the scripts tend to live in a middle ground between polished text and the inventive free-for-all.
The prominence of integrated underscoring and the adventuresome approaches to text make the guest appearances in Episode 7 feel like integral parts of the show. This is especially true of The Girl Who Goes Alone written and performed by sometime actor and prominent local poet, Elizabeth Austen.
Elizabeth Heffron’s Evangeline is almost wholly exposition as a turn-of-the-19th-century Seattle prostitute writes home to her mother. Occasional flashbacks and interruptions create drama but mostly it is storytelling. The excerpts performed from Lisa Halpern’s stage play Flying Through Blue suggest that a stage production would take an unusual form in and of itself. The episodes create a Zen echo of Ionesco in exploring the interior changes in one half of a settled couple. As presented for radio Halpern occasionally resorts to narration where surtitles might be used on stage.
Paul Mullin’s Markheim has a gleeful disregard for audience comprehension, if you haven’t been following along (all the back episodes are available online). There are descriptions of actions and locations written in the voice of Raymond Chandler—often without feeling clichéd. However once the dialogue gets started much of the storytelling relies on sound effects and oblique references. This is all the more challenging for the audience given that the world of the play is a fantasy of angels and demons running rampant in Seattle according to rules of Mullin’s invention. Ultimately the style proves more attractive than any need for an easily understood plot and the project remains a crowd favorite, though its star may be eclipsed by a new series.
My Cousin Katie from Ketchikan is all irony and shine as its ingenuous heroine finds her way through Seattle, snatches of her jingly theme song ringing out at every mention of her name. Not only has Scot Augustson created a winningly silly icon but in this initial episode he gives Seattle what we’ve long desired: The chance to witness the blithe destruction of a Chihuly masterpiece. Sadly one fears the sound effects are no match for the demands of the situation, but it’s a delicious fantasy nonetheless and one of many reasons to check out the Sandbox either in person or by podcast. The next live recording is set for April 29.
