A New Theater of Sound

"You got to go there to know there.”

The Greene Space Team took Zora’s words to heart and headed down to Eatonville, Florida (a small town 6 miles north of Orlando, Florida) in January 2012 to walk in the footsteps of the woman who was called “A Genius of the ...

Director: Karin Coonrod

Sir Alan Ayckbourn is an Olivier, Tony and Moliere Award winning playwright who has written 75 plays, more than half of which have been produced in London's West End, as well as on Broadway and around the world. As an acclaimed director, he has worked extensively in the West End and has also run his own company at the National Theatre. The Greene Space presents a series of plays by this distinguished playwright in celebration of the enormous breadth of his work.

Director: Karin Coonrod

Sir Alan Ayckbourn is an Olivier, Tony and Moliere Award winning playwright who has written 75 plays, more than half of which have been produced in London's West End, as well as on Broadway and around the world. As an acclaimed director, he has worked extensively in the West End and has also run his own company at the National Theatre. The Greene Space will present a series of plays by this distinguished playwright in celebration of the enormous breadth of his work.

It’s been a notable month for radio drama, we note it here – the death of Norman Corwin, one of the genre’s champions, inventors, missionaries, and poet-kings. There was a time when radio was the center of America’s cultural universe, and Norman Corwin was one of an inspired few who had grabbed hold of the medium and used it for artistic expression of the highest order.

Dramatization of the news started long before television!

The Greene Space's Shakepearean 'team'--Ricardo Fernandez, David Maclean, Sarah Montague, and Arthur Yorinks--are in London recording audio and video in anticipation of the Royal Shakespeare Company's forthcoming residency at the Armory, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Here are some notes from the field.

About blogging—I don’t.  To me this word suggests an action taken by something hairy with a club.

Think of me as a diarist, or an old-fashioned essayist, musing on that space that is somewhere between public and private, without any particular agenda.  The Charles Lamb of the audio set.  

As we begin our conversation it seems most appropriate to introduce my colleagues, Sarah Montague and Andy Lanset.

Sarah gives us her look on the history of radio drama while Andy laments the woeful lack of tangible pieces of that history; both speak with eloquence and verve.

It’s often a challenge when dealing with archive materials for web presentations.

You have audio and no photo or vice versa.  Additionally, materials we now recognize as being innovative and landmark productions may have been overlooked in their day, leaving little public record of their activities.  

It is hard to imagine, now that radio is so pervasive, what a miracle it seemed when a confluence of discoveries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries resulted in the first broadcasts.