It’s Halloween season, and a local theatre group is bringing the sounds of a classic scary story to the stage this weekend.
WKAR’s Scott Pohl takes us Inside the Arts with the Audio Air Force.
When you think of theatre, you probably imagine actors in costumes, with a creative set, lights, and props. That isn’t what you get with the Audio Air Force. For this theatre troupe, the inspiration is old fashioned audio production, like when WXYZ in Detroit produced The Lone Ranger for a radio audience in the 1930s.
In these programs, actors read from scripts while sound effects are produced by audio designers using everyday objects. Dave Downing of the Audio Air Force demonstrates a few, from the obvious, a small door, to the not so obvious, such as a plastic cup with a string running through it to a dowel which, when twisted, sounds like a creaking door, or the sound of thunder using a partially inflated balloon with a few BBs inside. and even a felt-lined box full of wooden blocks to create the march of soldiers.
Downing says the result is similar to what public radio listeners remember from A Prairie Home Companion. “We do recreations of old radio shows,” he explains, “but we really encourage original works. We do at least two shows a year where we do nothing but things that our people have written.”
They do rehearse ahead of time, but during the performance, Audio Air Force actors read from a script, so they aren’t required to memorize anything. Since they’re acting for the ear rather than the eye, they sometimes play more than one character, using different voices. It isn’t really a visual presentation, but some do dress in costume. For a program featuring superheroes, actors portraying Batman and Robin wore capes. Downing says that differs from other audio theatre programs around the country. “We try to be a little more visual than that because we know that audio theatre, at least in this area, is fairly new,” he continues. “Usually, a third or so of our audience, sometimes as much as a half, have never seen audio theatre before. So, if we’re a little bit more visual, it helps to keep their attention.”
In order to really understand this style of performance, Downing invites audiences to close their eyes at least part of the time. Like live radio, the crowd is part of the show, coached on applause and laughter. That includes some audio theatre history, which he says goes back to the time of Shakespeare.
There may not be a lot of laughter in the Audio Air Force Halloween show. In their first ten years at Halloween, they did shows like Dracula and War of the Worlds. This time, they’ve taken things a step further, securing the rights to create a radio-style drama based on the gothic novel, movies and TV series The Haunting of Hill House, adding “after several months of going back and forth with the publisher and the estate of the author, Shirley Jackson, they finally said ‘yeah, go ahead.’ We were just floored! So, we’ve been working a long time on doing the adaptation.”
Downing says the show will be scary, but still family friendly.
In an entertainment world filled with computer generated images, he says he’s motivated to create shows that stimulate a part of the imagination we don’t use much anymore. It isn’t just nostalgia. Downing concludes that “people are so visually oriented that they’ve lost what they call the theatre of the mind, and I think that if you close your eyes and imagine what’s going on, that’s better than any computer graphic anywhere.”
The Audio Air Force website has some recordings of past shows, including Dracula, a recreation of the Firesign Theatre comedy album The Adventures of Nick Danger, and even Shakespeare’s Macbeth. If you’d like to hear their production of The Haunting of Hill House,though, you’ll have to attend the show, because they don’t have streaming rights to the story.
The Audio Air Force production of The Haunting of Hill House is Friday and Saturday, October 25th and 26th, at the Hannah Community Center in East Lansing, at 7 p.m. both nights.
