Dead Air in Rosebud: radio drama brought to stage

By Laureen F. Guenther Times Contributor

Dead Air, a staged performance of radio plays, was produced in Rosebud’s BMO Studio Stage, Oct. 27.
“It was a Halloween variety show in the style of an old-time radio play,” said co-producer Peter Church, a Strathmore resident. “As a long-time fan of the old radio shows from the ’30s and ’40s, I’ve been producing podcasts and radio-style stage plays in Toronto and Vancouver for almost a decade.”
Church co-produced the show with Rosebud School of the Arts (RSA) graduates Mike Thiessen, creator of the Welcome to Mutant County podcast which he and Church perform; and Natalie Kloster, who staged and performed a full-length radio play for her Final Project earlier this year.
Church, Thiessen and Kloster performed the show with Caleb Gordon, another RSA graduate.
Dead Air opened with a radio play called The Dark by Arch Oboler, originally broadcast in 1936. Church said, “it’s about a hideous fog that turns people inside out when it touches them.” The second segment was a new play by Kloster, called Halloween Ghost Boy on Highway 4, about Saskatchewan ghost stories. The last segment was a new, live episode of the Welcome to Mutant County podcast, called Mutant County Origins.
“The audience was fantastic,” Thiessen said. “They loved it. You could hear their oohs and aahs. It was great to hear those 30 to 40 people laugh at jokes that would be inside jokes that you’d get only if you’d heard the podcast.”
Church said he and Thiessen “were both a little stunned by how many fans of the podcast turned out. I was also very pleased to hear how many audience members were excited by the effectiveness of audio drama. It’s easy to think of radio shows as a thing of the past, but it was encouraging to hear people realizing it’s still as effective and exciting as ever.”
And most importantly, Thiessen said, “they want to see more of it.”
Thiessen, Church and Kloster hope to produce more radio play events, possibly one on a Christmas theme, incorporating monsters, mutants and aliens.
In the meantime, fans can listen to Welcome to Mutant County podcast episodes performed by Church and Thiessen, at mutantcounty.com, and via podcast distributors like Spotify, Apple and SoundCloud. New episodes are available on the 1st and 15th of every month.
Welcome to Mutant County is a “science fiction-type story that takes place in a place much like Wheatland County,” Thiessen said. “About a triune apocalyptic event happening where there’s a nuclear power plant that melts down, a meteor that crash-lands and brings about an alien race (and) a weird cult that starts and opens up a gateway to a spiritual dimension.”
The series begins 10 years after the disaster.
“Life in the village has continued to limp along and adjust to the local aberrations,” Church said. “The story is told through the eyes of two surviving radio hosts.”
Thiessen said anyone who loves old radio shows, science fiction or satire, especially political satire, would enjoy Welcome to Mutant County.