Jennilee Murray and David O’Meara perform Live Radio Play, which premiered at the Knox Presbyterian Church as part of Ottawa International Writer’s festival.
With the Mayan Calendar indicating the coming apocalypse this December, local artist and award-winning poet David O’Meara set out to tackle the notion of impending doom in Live Radio Play.
The play is an homage to old-time radio plays where the voice acting, music and sound effects are produced on the spot.
O’Meara enlisted the help of Jennilee Murray and Ian Keteku to write and act out the play and sought local musician Mike Dubue and cellist Octavie Dostaler-Lalonde to compose the soundtrack.
The group premiered the show at Knox Presbyterian Church on Elgin Street during the annual Ottawa International Writer’s Festival last week.
The apocalypse is hardly a new theme to be explored, but Dubue and O’Meara take a unique approach to it in their writing.
“Everyone’s idea of the end is different,” O’Meara says. “Apocalyptic films tend to be pre-apocalypse or post, where people are dealing with the aftermath.”
In writing the play, O’Meara explored situations people might exaggeratingly construe as the end of the world.
These situations aren’t quite apocalyptic, but to the characters portrayed in the play, some common life events seem nearly insurmountable.
“The end of the world” is a phrase that gets thrown out there a lot. It means different things to different people but it rarely indicates an end to life as we know it.
In one scene, a couple expecting a baby reminisces about a condom breaking during a past vacation. The man saw the subsequent conception as the end of the world.
In another scene, a man tries to feed a sick woman a fruit smoothie, but she’s so ill that she can't taste or enjoy it. Her inability to enjoy taste is its own doomsday.
The play lasts about an hour and moves through a dozen-plus scenes. The transitions between the scenes are abrupt, usually ending with the gentle notes of cellist Dostaler-Lalonde.
Keteku, known more for being the current World Poetry Slam champion, says it was hard to conduct research before writing this style of play, given the lack of recent material in the genre.
“I don’t think I’ve ever listened to a radio play outside of school,” says Keteku.
Digging back into archives to find these productions was a challenge, he said.
But the challenge helped give him some appreciation for the work that goes into creating a completely live show.
Dubue, another local talent known for his band Hilotrons, composed the score for the play and orchestrated most of the sound effects during the live performance.
He said he spent hours creating digital sound samples and building acoustic gadgets to be incorporated in the show.
Instruments, soundboards and other untraditional gizmos surround Dubue.
At one point, he pulled out a cellist’s bow and slowly dragged it across the edges of a xylophone’s bars, creating screechy, tense notes that cut through the melancholy of Dostaler-Lalonde’s cello.
Originally, the group had planned to do the entire set live, without the aid of pre-recorded sounds and digital audio effects.
“There is something to be said for the sort of contemporary radio play, whereby you’re not relying solely on organic materials to create your sound,” Keteku says.
“The technology that is used today is part of the technology that we’re employing in creating this radio play, and it’s a sort of amalgamation of electric-acoustic stuff."
“I would never think of getting anything this big for anything,” he continues, pointing to the four-foot high, wooden contraption the group uses to produce the sound of wind.
One of the actors turns a crank-arm and a cloth conveyor belt winds around a wooden cylinder producing a very convincing howling of wind.
The contraption is used throughout the play and in the final scene, where two characters stare off into an abyss.
As the howling of the wind calms down, the room goes silent, but applause doesn’t start until O’Meara lets the audience know the play is over.
“Well, we should have practiced the ending a little more,” quips O’Meara.