Dead Men Don't Do Radio Plays

This month, we’re going to be using the five senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch) as the basis for exercises and theatre games. This week, we’re looking at auditory-based exercises: actively listening, hearing each other, expressing ourselves and telling stories through music, sound effects, and silence. Here are some exercises to try with your students that use hearing and listening as their focus. 1. Active ListeningStart out by working on active listening activities with your students. Developing students’ active listening skills will benefit them not only in drama class, but in their everyday lives! 3-5-7 is a fun warm-up exercise for working on active listening. Hearing or Listening encourages students to consider how they feel when they’re not being heard or listened to. If you’re teaching online, here are some tips for encouraging active listening in the digital classroom as well. 2. Volume & Enunciation ActivitiesActors need to be able to be heard onstage. If your students have voices that are perfectly audible when they’re backstage but seem to vanish onstage, try any or all of the following exercises to help them improve their enunciation and volume (without shouting). • 6 Tips to Improve Enunciation • A Vocal Warm-Up for the Articulators • Whisper and Shout • Can You Hear Me Now? • Projecting Your Voice Without Yelling 3. Auditory ObservationsOnce students have worked on their vocal skills, have them “observe” each other performing scenes or improv work, with the following catch: the observing students must close their eyes, be blindfolded, or turn their backs to the performing students, and give feedback specifically focused on what they heard. For example, they can comment on aspects such as vocal volume and expression, clarity and enunciation, use of accents, use of music and/or sound effects, and sound balance (e.g., is the background music drowning out the performers?). If students need help giving feedback, try these resources: Effective Peer Feedback, Giving and Receiving Feedback, and Giving Feedback with Kindness. 4. The Rain Game challenges students to create a soundscape using only their bodies. What other auditory stories could your students tell, using just their bodies, their voices to create sounds, found objects from the drama classroom, or background music? Try having your students create a soundscape of the jungle, under the sea, a daycare centre, or a crowded subway using only materials they have available in the drama classroom or in their school bags. 5. Show PlaylistOne of my favourite parts of directing a production is creating a playlist of music to play during pre-show, intermission, and post-show. Assign each of your students a play to study and have them create a playlist of at least 10 songs that demonstrate and complement their vision of the show. Students will include a write-up of why they selected each song. Note: If the show has an existing soundtrack, none of those songs can be included in the playlist! For example, if the student is creating a playlist for Romeo and Juliet, they can’t include the song “#1 Crush” by Garbage, because it was on the soundtrack for the 1996 film Romeo + Juliet by Baz Luhrmann. 6. The Sounds of SilenceWhat does silence sound like? Unless you are in a vacuum, there is no such thing as true silence. Have students sit quietly in the drama classroom or in the hallway for three to four minutes. (If time allows, you might wish to share videos of various performances of John Cage’s “4’33” for fun.) Students may not speak and must sit as still as possible during that time. Have them listen intently to the sounds that occur in the silence: the buzzing of the overhead lights, the murmurs of a teacher giving a lecture in a nearby classroom, footsteps in the hallway, a sneeze or sniffle, an uncomfortable giggle, an impatient exhale… After the time is up, have students journal about what they heard and any observations or feelings that arose while listening. How can they apply this experience to their work in the drama classroom? Could these observations or this experience prompt a monologue or scene? 7. Radio PlaysRadio plays are the ultimate auditory theatrical experience. There are no visual aspects (they’re meant to be played on the radio, hence the name), so performers must rely on their vocal performances as well as sound effects and music to convey the story to the audience. Check out Dead Men Don’t Do Radio Plays by Allison Williams and Arctic Adventure Theatre: The Case of the Crazed Crashers by Matt Webster, both from the Theatrefolk play catalogue, to get you started.

March 8th is International Women’s Day – and what better time to highlight some amazing women within the Theatrefolk community. Join us in celebrating these phenomenal playwrights and authors and their incredible contributions to the world of student theatre. Plus, keep reading to see our Top 10 Plays for Female Casts at the end of the post! Rachel Atkins • Baalzebub (and One Act Version)

Welcome to our Featured Play Spotlight. Dead Men Don’t Do Radio Plays by Allison Williams is a collection of two plays that can be performed separately or combined to make a full evening of theatre. Steve Powell is radio star Frank Grayson, Private Eye. But in real life he’s not as suave, doesn’t have a way with the ladies and has a habit of narrating his life. But that doesn’t stop crimes from falling into his life. Can little Stevie Palowski step into a PI’s shoes and get the dame? Dead men may not do radio plays, but you definitely should introduce this genre to your students. Put together a SFX crew and bring the radio sounds to life. All the effects are itemized, including suggestions. Why did we publish this play? Dead Men Don’t Do Radio Plays shows how you can present a radio play as it was done back in the day with practical sound effects. Put together a SFX crew and bring the radio to life. All the effects used in Dead Men are itemized, including suggestions. What an awesome project to introduce to your students! Let’s hear from the author! 1. Why did you write this play? I wrote these plays because I’d been reading all the old Perry Mason mysteries, and I wanted to create radio scripts with that same “last-minute surprise witness!” element of the old novels. And those books are so much fun – women keep sliding out of cars with “a dangerous flash of a shapely knee” and it’s so neat to see how our social mores have changed. 2. Describe the theme in one or two sentences. That it’s important to be yourself, but it can help you succeed to try on being someone else, too. 3. What’s the most important visual for you in this play? That the sound effects team are part of the main action. It’s so much fun for the audience to watch them create the atmosphere. 4. If you could give one piece of advice for those producing the play, what would it be? Go ahead and use the paper scripts. It’s what radio players would have done, and it means you don’t have to give your cast the “You can’t call line any more!” speech. 5. Why is this play great for student performers? Because it’s “radio,” students can focus on character voices, and not worry too much about their bodies. Actors of course eventually develop both those elements, but for young actors, it’s a great way to really thoroughly get comfortable with a character voice before putting it all together in a play with more movement.

Time for a Tfolk Top Ten Plays To….Stretch your tech. ** We pride ourselves at Theatrefolk that you can produce most of our plays with two cubes. And you could take away one of the cubes if you had to. But what if you want to stretch your tech? What if you’ve got a production class with kids who must design for more than two cubes? Wonder no longer. **Here are 10 plays that will Stretch your Tech. Click the link and you’ll be taken to the webpage for each play. There you’ll get the details and read sample pages. Hand this list over to your student directors and see what they think. All the best with your search!

Episode 144: Looking At Theatre in a New LightIn this episode we have two interviews that explore theatre in a new light. That’s the wonderful thing about theatre – it is malleable, it’s changeable. You can approach the act of theatre is so many different ways. It can happen in a theatre, it can happen in a parking lot. It can be realistic, absurd, intimate, epic, people can break into song at any moment. You can take a piece of theatre and put it in a different style. You can take something from another genre and apply it to a theatrical form. Clark Taylor took a podcast and turned it into a play with shadow puppetry, actors, and live music. The students at Shelby High School took a script and filmed it in locations around the school. Theatre can happen any time, anywhere.