For the past little while I have been writing short 5-minute radio plays and collaborating with the production company PocketBear, for their God-Knows-WhereBear series. Three new additions are available to listen to: Thought, Harold, I Think I'm Home, and Out and About. All three plays are part of the series OnGoing, by yours truly, which also includes previously published audio plays: I'm Going Now, Eugene, and Filet of Sole.
Listen below, and beyond that read about their origins and process. Enjoy.
A rational response to our current situation seems unhelpful, useless, and inauthentic. A decimating pandemic continues to rage; society rightly demands an end to systemic racism; yet we are living under the blanket of a reality-show-government designed only for photo ops and greed. I think absurd is one artistic response.
But not just absurd: somehow we need to allow a search for meaning. Parting the mists of the last century we find a somewhat similar upheaval in the 1960s, which is where I found inspiration for these short plays. The 1960s was when Eugene Ionesco was writing about the stasis of convention (The Bald Soprano) and the dangers of conformity (Rhinoceros). And when one of the playwrighting giants, Harold Pinter, made us re-examine the thin ice of our relationships and demanded we regard the disturbances of truth with a focused stare.
Working with actor and director Anthony Caruso—while we are all locked down in our individual spaces—meant thinking of people trapped in their own spaces, alone, with others. I’ve always liked working in a short form, and these audio dramas seemed to fit perfectly on a small canvas. But even as I reached back to Ionesco and Pinter, I wanted these characters to be as real as… well, do we really know what our next-door neighbors or the couple down the hall are thinking and doing these days?
Robert Moulthrop / Playwright / New York City, June 2020.