Daily Sitka Sentinel

Sitka Players to Present Classic Radio Onstage

By ABIGAIL BLISS
Sentinel Staff Writer
    The Greater Sitka Arts Council’s Sitka Community Theater will present a Radio Adventure Hour composed of three plays ranging in subject and style at 7 p.m. Friday at the Sitka Performing Arts Center.
    Tickets are $10 for adults, $8 for students and seniors, available at Old Harbor Books and at the door.
    Before a recent rehearsal for “Nine Striking Beauties,” one of the three dramas to be performed on Friday, sound artist Jean Stolberg set up her station. She assessed the snap of a plastic ruler against a table, unwrapped a bag of tiny bottles and tested their tinkling, and lined up two tan high-heeled shoes within reach.
    Over the course of the rehearsal, Stolberg and her partners were tasked with providing live sound effects for the piece’s fictional account of America’s first female baseball team. They layered the satisfying smack of a ball into the back of a catcher’s mitt over the play’s back-and-forth banter using a rubber boot, created the familiar thwack of slingback shoes to herald an approaching character, and simulated the sound of breaking glass by shaking their collection of small bottles.
    The director of the piece, Keriann Gilson, believes those live sound effects are a main draw of the live performance. “The big thing that people come to see is the sound effects and how all of that comes together,” she said.
    Although this is Gilson’s first time directing for GSAC Sitka Community Theater, she brings her experience teaching drama at Sitka High School to her directorial debut with Radio Adventure Hour.
    To accurately reflect the historic piece, which first aired on Nov. 5, 1933, Gilson’s actors adopt affects specific to the era for its two central female baseball players – who get “fresh” at first base among “boos and catcalls from the grandstand” – as well as for their opponents, manager and umpire.
    “It’s a Mid-North Atlantic accent,” Gilson explained. “That was kind of popular in those days, especially in the 1930s. If you’ve ever seen ‘A League of Their Own,’ it’s that kind of accent. It sets us more in the time period.”
    Zeke Blackwell, who voices the part of team manager Bill Hawkins, expressed gratitude for the opportunity to try his hand at a historic piece and affection for his quirky character. “This one is really fun because it is an authentic 1930s radio play. It’s been a great time,” he said. “My character’s a bit manic, at least the way that I’m playing him. He doesn’t really have a good idea of what he’s doing, but he has a good heart.”
    The second play to be performed during Radio Adventure Hour is “The Aviatrix,” written and directed by Sotera Perez. Set immediately after World War II, during the golden age of Hollywood, the original piece drops its audience into “Episode Seven” of a fictional radio serial to tell the tale of flying ace Lottie Coleman and her sidekick mechanic.
    Although Perez’ play differs from “Nine Striking Beauties” in scope and style, it shares the historic piece’s focus on female characters. This common thread, Perez explained, was by design. “It goes back to trying to find female-focused stories, which was really important to me,” she said. “In the course of reading, at this point, dozens of transcripts of radio plays, I realized that what we are facing are a lot of attitudes that just don’t read to modern sensibilities.”
    Last spring, Perez directed an adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” and, though the piece was written by a female author and driven by female characters, Perez found herself bumping up against antiquated attitudes about women. She resolved to write an original script, her first, for Sitka Community Theater’s next live radio event.
    “I wasn’t interested in trying to transform any more work that didn’t positively center the kind of stories that I wanted to hear,” she explained. “We could write something that sounds vintage and has the same sort of excitement, but also subverts these tropes that were just entrenched in older stories.”
    Perez said the process of seeing her words brought to life was both gratifying and instrumental in her creative process.
    “We sat down at auditions, when I had about the first third of the play written, and I heard just voice after voice and their takes on these characters, and I thought ‘Whoa, that’s not even something I had thought of,’” she recalled. “Once I got the script in the hands of my cast, they really took it and ran with it. They’ve given me ideas about these characters that I had never even considered.”
    Perez echoed Gilson’s appreciation for Radio Adventure Hour’s sound artists. “On my piece, we have three sound effect artists working, and they have two full tables of props and tools and microphones. They are never still. They’re magicians,” she said.
    For the third play of the evening, “The Brothers Grimm Spectaculathon” by Don Zolidis, the sound artists flex their skills to simulate, among several sounds, a puff of smoke with the opening and closing of an umbrella.
    Directed by Sitka High School’s drama, debate and forensics coach, Christian Litten, “The Brothers Grimm Spectaculathon” pays tribute to the Grimms’ fairy tale oeuvre.
    “Basically, it’s a narrator and four actors doing their best to tell as many Brothers Grimm stories in a short amount of time. They decide to combine all the Brothers Grimm stories into one mega story, and while they don’t hit all 209, they do hit quite a few,” Litten explained.
    He first encountered the play through his work with the DDF team, when it won the reader’s theater state championship in February.  He said it stood out as a piece that would please in-person audience members in addition to those listening to the sound recording on its own.
    “This is my second year directing and my third being involved. The people that buy tickets and go to see it live have really become important to me,” he said. “I decided to pick a piece that caters to people there in the theater. We even have a part of the show that involves audience participation.”
    Perez expressed satisfaction with the range of plays to be presented in the show, which was broadened by the break in era and pace provided by “The Brothers Grimm Spectaculathon.”
    “It’s nice to have this more innovative, modern approach to wrap things up,” Perez said.
    “They’re all different plays, really, and that’s what’s exciting about this,” added Gilson. “You don’t want to come to a show and see the same play over and over again. With it being so varied, I think it’s going to be more exciting.”