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Editor's Note: This is a continuation of the work done in All the Spectrum's a Stage: Part One. Here, Newt Schottelkotte digs into an analysis of farce, boundaries, suspension of disbelief, and the symbiosis between live theater and audio we witnessed in podcasting during the pandemic.
Please return to your seats, and welcome back! This is part two of my deep dive into audio drama as theatre of the mind, and two shows by a producer team that exemplify that beautifully: The Vanishing Act (TVA) and Fawx and Stallion (F&S). In part one, we looked at some of the techniques of creating a show onstage and how you can apply those to making audio drama in a way that enhances its theatrical appeal. Audio drama and live, staged theatre are alike in the sense that a lot is implied: some monster noises and a fireplace sound effect can be the climactic spell that wins an encounter; a camping tent and fire pit can be a spot in the wilderness to stay the night. The rules of storytelling, like “show, don’t tell”, become blurry when much of your visuals are up to implication and interpretation.
Farce has always been relatively flippant about those kinds of rules– theatre in general, really. Things like what is and isn’t possible, or realistic, or technically correct have always been pushed aside in favor of far more interesting questions such as, “Isn’t it crazy how many candles we can fit on this one stage that’s also covered in fog and constantly changing its tableau to accommodate a moving boat and catwalk?” Gender is one of those such concepts; far more malleable and historically challenged in theatre than film and television, from men playing female characters during Shakespeare’s time, to productions like 1776’s 2022 revival being the latest in a long line of gender-bent casts (albeit one of the first to include nonbinary and genderqueer people in its palette to play with). For a show not deliberately about gender, TVA takes an extremely classical farce approach with its casting, challenging the listener to ask why they find some characters more likable than others and what flaws they’re willing to excuse because of the pitch of someone’s voice. But to talk about that, we have to talk about Augie Eckhart.
Voice Acting and Gender
Augie is voiced by Sarah Price, who in addition to doing a superb (and in fact Audio Verse Award-winning) job bringing the character to life, is also a cisgender woman. That casting opens the character up to a number of interpretations, my personal one choosing to examine Augie as a depiction of a trans man clinging to toxic hypersexual masculinity because he was brought up in an environment that taught him his status as a “real man” was terrifyingly conditional on being the same kind of sleazy rich prick as the other (cis) boys (yes, I grew up a transmasc in Appalachia, how can you tell). While an interpretation of the text is all that is, the gender politics of having a hyper-masculine, chauvinist auteur voiced by a woman are utterly brilliant. Augie’s character is so deeply entrenched in his status as a man that, by the time I was halfway through the second episode, I had completely forgotten his voice actor isn’t one. Imagine if we applied that willingness to “just go with it” to actual trans actors regardless of their state/type of transition?
As a transmaculine lesbian who does voice acting, choosing what roles to audition for and which casting offers I feel comfortable accepting can feel like a minefield. My gender is quite honestly “Whichever line for the bathroom is the shortest”, and I’ve played characters that are male, female, cis, trans, nonbinary, genderfluid– you name it. Regardless of, and in fact because of, Augie’s voice actor being cis, TVA’s approach to casting is incredibly simple, and presents the problem of mindful casting with respect to gender diversity with the sharpest of Occam’s Razors: open casting (within reason to ensure that representation of marginalized identities is authentic) that allows anyone who wants to play the role to try out for it, and the best actor for the character to be selected from that pool.
In addition to creating a more equitable and welcoming casting process for actors of all genders, the example TVA sets encourages listeners to examine some of their own biases and instincts about what they hear. Would Augie be my favorite character if he were voiced by a cis man? No; I probably wouldn’t even like him. Price’s voice for the character naturally hits that sweet spot that I’ve heard in a lot of my transmasculine friends just as their voices start to drop, as well as the deeper-voiced women I know. It’s a pitch that can be anything from masculine in a distinctly trans way, to feminine, to androgynous, and as such it makes me, who is sort of all three at once depending on the day and if Mercury is in retrograde, immediately comfortable and endeared.
That in itself makes my love for the character discomforting: am I being gender essentialist by only liking this character because he has a voice typical of those socialized as female? Why do I think the things he says and does would be any more excusable coming from a cis woman or transmasculine person? What does it say about our culture that the act of a woman getting to play such an irrefutably male archetype is refreshing enough to make the character loveable despite him starting the story as an objective nightmare? What does it say about me that I don’t mind hearing someone whose voice sounds a lot like mine say and do those things, as long as it's in a genderweird context?
Theater's Boundaries and the Suspension of Disbelief
Theatre’s insistence on suspending your disbelief to cope with its limitations as a medium is what gives us the opportunity to ask these questions. I’ve preached to new creators time and time again that a small budget, lack of experience, or tight production constraints shouldn’t stop you from making a fiction podcast; it just means you’ll have to get creative when planning how to bring your ideas to life. This is one of the first things taught to new directors: you can’t fit a giant mechanical sandworm puppet in a college black box, so either find a way to tell the story without it, or come up with a new idea. As Emily Nussbaum says in her book I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution about the show The Good Wife, “... strict boundaries—the sort that govern sonnets—can inspire greater brilliance than absolute freedom”.
This boundary plays into one of the most important parts of your show: your cast of characters and how they interact with each other. Especially in an ensemble cast, part of the actors’ job is to make choices, even when they aren’t the focus of the moment, that tell us about the relationship that each character has to another. It makes the world, and by extension the people you have chosen to populate it with, feel bigger than just the single story you are currently telling.
...there is something about seeing live performance that cannot be replaced by a recording whether in theatre, music, or comedy.
In an audio-only medium, this can be significantly harder without the ability for the audience to perceive background choices, much less nonverbal ones. One of the places where Fawx & Stallion shines especially is giving us an ensemble cast that we can easily believe not only has a history with each other, but actively chooses to be a part of their small and strange found family. This is done through a combination of clever dialogue and natural cast chemistry. We talked about the importance of distinct voices in casting back in part one, but doing chemistry tests with potential actors to increase the chances of them developing believable dynamics. People love seeing stories portrayed by people who naturally click, and develop that intimacy in their acting choices.
That brings us to what I like to call “the bootleg question”: why, even when filmed bootlegs of Broadway shows are as easy to find as searching “Gay Jewish family has WORST Bar Mitzvah ever slime tutorial” on YouTube, do people still spend hundreds of dollars and travel across the country to see live theatre? Why have bootlegs only made theatre more accessible to people usually unable to go see a show on Broadway (people whose disabilities make in-person theatre impossible or difficult, marginalized groups that traditionally face financial hardship, etc) rather than detracting from ticket sales, and in fact, it can be argued, make people more eager to buy tickets?
The answer, however hard it may be for the businessmen of the Great White Way to swallow, is simple: there is something about seeing live performance that cannot be replaced by a recording, whether in theatre, music, or comedy. Ask any professional stage actor and you’ll hear dozens of beloved stories of a flubbed line or missing prop that needs a clever moment of improv to save the day. Fans of an artist cross their fingers that, when they attend a concert, they’ll get to see a surprise encore or audience request surrounded by people as passionate as them. Standup comedians make half their career on heckling. Fiction podcast fans eagerly hope their favorite show will get popular enough to announce a live performance. When audio drama was the radio play, it was live on the air and anything could happen.
Maintaining Live Show Energy in Audio
While a live show may not be in your production’s future, you can still take aspects of the experience to enhance it. The easiest one is improv; let your actors play with lines and make them their own in the booth, especially if you’re recording synchronously. So much of live theatre (and radio plays) is reacting to the energy of the other actors onstage and shifting your performance to match. That can come in the form of line reads, or the line itself. Some of my favorite bits of both shows come from the actors being given space to get creative and develop the characters while in the booth, including the line from TVA episode four, “Our chemistry. It’s electric. Boogie woogie woogie,” improvised by Maeve Devitt.
Maintaining the energy of the room is why, even though it takes more planning and effort than just having people send in lines and giving them notes, I always try to live direct (or even better, record over Zoom together) at least lead and supporting actors. It’s a truth that many actors who’ve worked at Marvel’s “green screen and tennis ball studio” will speak to: acting is easier and often done better when two human beings can play off of each other. Anyone who’s rehearsed what they’re going to say to a person, then actually had to say it in real life, knows that the mood of a moment or the energy someone is giving off can affect what you say and how you say it.
...what sets TVA and F&S apart is that they are also well-produced, well-written, genuinely hilarious professional affairs. Listening to them feels like getting to have your cake and eat it too.
There’s a deeper importance to this connection as well. TVA released in 2020 and 2021, when live theatre was, for a time, impossible, much less safe. So many theatre companies, performance houses, and young creatives waiting for school to be back in session tried their hand at audio drama in order to replace the stage with the editing bay. When I asked Thompson and Geers what it meant to be making art about the theatre while most were shut down, Thompson said:
“We were in a pretty unique position in that we had already recorded the first few episodes in-person and in chronological order right before the pandemic—at that point we were operating with a much smaller cast who were doubling a lot more roles—so we had already established our cast chemistry… We got to encourage them to lean into the theatricality of it instead, specifically in the semi-overlapping rhythms, internal tempos, and in imbuing a physicality to the humor—because that physicality really does read in the performances even if you can’t see it”.
Geers added:
“Doing a show about theater, with our friends that we’d made doing theater felt incredibly natural. It became a way to not only make the show but see our friends. If anything, we found more excuses to bring their voices as improvisers/actors into the recordings. There was so much beautiful weirdness happening during those recording sessions. And knowing we could survive the pivot to remote recording was just another example of the malleability and ingenuity of the art form. I think it really helped us find the rhythm and voice for the show”.
What is truly the secret sauce to these shows is how much fun it feels like the cast is having together; a group of old friends and new making art that they’re passionate about. Many amateur shows have that distinction, but what sets TVA and F&S apart is that they are also well-produced, well-written, genuinely hilarious professional affairs. Listening to them feels like getting to have your cake and eat it too.
In the past two years since my last show before the pandemic hit (an ensemble ghost in The Addams Family during my senior year of high school), I can pinpoint the precise one-two punch that made me fall back in love with theatre from both of the roles I play in it. For sound design, it was a vacation in New York City this October where I snagged dirt cheap standing room tickets to The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway my last night in the city. I’d already seen the show once when the tour came to my hometown a few years back, but that night my “seat” happened to be right next to the sound booth, where the very kind and chatty board operator was engineering and running the show on QLaB. As someone just about to go into tech for my first time sound designing a live stage show, it was immensely thrilling to watch a professional mix and run such an incredible musical using the same program and technology I would (and more than a little validating). George Huckins, I hope you find a million dollars on the street every day for the rest of your life.
For acting, it was a scene in episode one of The Vanishing Act that takes place at a birthday party from hell, packed to the brim with lightning-fast line jumps, moments for the ensemble to shine, comedic blocking, witty and wordplay-heavy dialogue, and a style of performance that felt achingly familiar. My first thought was, “Wow, I can see exactly how this would be done onstage from the set design to the body language”. My second thought was, “Oh God, I’m homesick”.