Radio dramas tell chilling tales
It’s the time of year for spooky stories, and if you can’t watch them at theaters, how about listening to them?
A hard-boiled detective is drawn into the supernatural world while searching for a missing teen. A door at an old Nantucket house mysteriously opens by itself, but only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. One ghost haunts Chatham, another takes the stage at ‘Sconset Casino.
It’s the time of year for spooky stories, and if you can’t watch them at theaters on Cape Cod and the Islands, how about listening to them at home? (Lights off recommended.)
With live performances impossible because of the pandemic, both writer/sound designer J Hagenbuckle, working with Cape Cod Theatre Company/Harwich Junior Theatre in West Harwich, and writer/director Mark Shanahan, with White Heron Theatre Company on Nantucket, have turned back the clock to radio dramas — with contemporary twists.
What’s resulted is a type of entertainment that can be created without anyone interacting, and what Hagenbuckle calls “excitement for your ears.”
Another positive: Audience members don’t need to be anywhere near the Cape or Nantucket to enjoy them. Shanahan has been shocked to get fans from as far away as China and Dubai for his based-on-true-tales island ghost stories.
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“The idea (was) that if people can’t go to the theater, we’d bring it to them,” says Shanahan, who has worked with award-winning Broadway sound designer/composer John Gromada on the series. “It turned out to be more successful than we could have imagined in our wildest dreams.”
It was the search for a creative outlet during the pandemic — for writers, producers and actors — that inspired the pivots to audio storytelling. White Heron’s “Ghost Light Series” aired eight episodes last summer on island NPR station WNCK. Three stories from Hagenbuckle’s “Cape Noir Radio Theater” have been broadcast since last month on WOMR radio in Provincetown/Orleans.
All are available online, and both series have new episodes upcoming for Halloween (see box).
On Oct. 29, it's Cape Noir’s “The Chatham Ghost,” a “tale of treachery, horror and vengeance” that Hagenbuckle recorded in his studio last year with Chatham writer Frank Dubas, and with narration by Orleans actor Richard Wilbur. Then Halloween will mark the WNCK debut of a double bill that includes Shanahan’s adaptation of Irish horror writer M.R. James’ 1904 “Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You My Lad” that moves the haunted-house story to 1980s Nantucket.
In this “terrifying” 2020, Shanahan says, “there’s so much anxiety in the air, but I think it’s really fun to let a good ghost story kind of be the catharsis, a little bit of exorcism. To talk about those things we can’t see, but are there, feels particularly appropriate right now. … Ghost stories seem to be the perfect things to help us laugh at ourselves, but also deal with some anxiety and fear and also have a little fun.”
Here’s how these new takes on a nostalgic form of entertainment came about:
Cape Noir Radio Theater
Thrillers, suspense, science fiction, fantasy and the supernatural were all genres that impacted Hagenbuckle growing up, and that he mined for stage adaptations he wrote in past years for CCTC/HJT that included “Dracula” and “The Invisible Man.”
His first radio show, “Frank Brand Private Eye in Double Trouble,” started out as an idea for a play to be presented live on the West Harwich stage in radio-show form. “COVID kicked in and all my freelance work ended,” says Hagenbuckle, who is also a musician. “That led me to finishing the play in my studio and wanting to create more.”
The radio style was inspired by everything from the first radio drama he ever heard, Orson Welles’ “The War of The Worlds,” through vintage fare like “The Shadow,” to the “more technically advanced” work of Joe Frank for NPR Playhouse. Hagenbuckle’s detective Frank Brand lives on the edge of danger in a shady world the writer says was influenced by authors like Raymond Chandler and William Burroughs, movies like “Double Indemnity” and “Touch Of Evil,” and shows like “The Twilight Zone” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”
“For artists, any and all experience gets tucked away in the subconscious where it percolates then bubbles up in the form of ideas,” he says by email. “I can’t draw a straight line from listening to the radio and reading ‘Hardy Boys’ books when I was growing up in the ‘50s to this project now. It looks more like overlapping concentric circles of experience with my imagination at center.”
Plus a sense of humor as he spoofs the genre a bit with colorful metaphors like “her hair curling like Del Rey surf” and “I felt my spine tingle like the coin-operated Magic Fingers at the Las Vegas Holiday Inn bridal suite.”
The recording, mixing and editing — the “practical work of making those ideas happen” — has all taken place in his home studio, with help from CCTC/HJT artistic director Nina Schuessler, as voice talent and story consultant, and company actors. The first show took more than a month to create, but Hagenbuckle says “things are moving along more quickly now that I know what I’m doing.”
He’s grateful to WOMR staff for getting his work heard, and is enthusiastic about creating this new form of entertainment at a time when COVID-19 has stopped so much art-making. Cape Noir has “given me an opportunity to stay busy and challenged using all my creative experience and skills, but doing something with them I’ve never done before,” he says.
Upcoming original shows and adaptations include “a dark comedy thriller”; a third Frank Brand episode; an homage to thriller writer Jim Thompson; and “a story about a fisherman who talks to starfish that fall from the sky at night.”
“My plan,” Hagenbuckle says, “is to keep going until I hit the wall!”
“The Ghost Light Series”
When Blue Balliett‘s 1984 book “Nantucket Ghosts, 44 True Accounts” was published, then-teen Shanahan and friends all had copies, and he’s kept the book in his house since. When a radio-drama idea arose last spring, he wanted to tell tales that were island-centric. Local ghost stories seemed ideal for a medium in which listeners' minds create images of what they can't see.
Meeting and working with Balliett, Shanahan used the stories she had collected as jumping-off points to write original tales related to island history. “The Tipping Table” is based on the story of a table that moved to spell out messages from an old sailor’s spirit, and Shanahan focused on a reporter who tries to debunk the story but can’t. “Harry’s Ghost” tells of people seeing the ghost of actor Harry Woodruff at his former ‘Sconset home from the spectral figure’s point of view.
Some scripts came quickly, others he toiled over for weeks. Island actors, including Tony Award-winner Judith Ivey, recorded dialogue on their own, and Gromada then took a couple of weeks to put it all together — making “it sound like everybody was in the same room,” Shanahan notes — and score the half-hour stories.
“John and I have done shows all over the country together, and he recently said ‘I’m as proud of these shows, particularly under the circumstances, as I am of anything I’ve ever done’ and I feel that way as well,” Shanahan says. “I’m lucky to have that experience. I had to learn to write for radio, I had to learn to direct and dramatize things differently and that’s fun. But it just takes getting your head around it all.”
The series has generated thousands of new fans for White Heron and, unexpectedly, donations as well. Shanahan has been gratified to get thank-you notes and photos of families gathered around laptops for a series he had thought might interest “a few people” on-island.
“That’s part of the joy of it, too — from the cozy confines of White Heron in downtown Nantucket, these stories have spread out and found their way to ears of listeners who may never have come to Nantucket, or may have been there before and get to kind of revisit it in their minds, no matter where they are on the face of the Earth.”
He and artistic director Lynne Bolton have been thrilled enough by the reaction that White Heron has a radio version of his perennial “A Nantucket Christmas Carol” in the works, and some of the ghost stories may be adapted for the stage once live theater is allowed again.
The pandemic shutdown “feels like a huge moment to kind of confront if you work in the field that we work in. It can make you despair for sure,” Shanahan says. “But I don’t want to look back and say ‘We just stopped making things.’ And in fact, we’re making things that we wouldn’t have made before, and we’re really glad people love it, and we’re proud of it.”
HOW TO LISTEN
• Cape Noir Radio Theater: 8:30 to 9 p.m. every second and fourth Thursday, including Oct. 22, plus a Halloween special Oct. 29, on WOMR 92.1 FM Provincetown or WFMR 91.3 Orleans. Also online at https://womr.org (click on podcasts in a "Listen" box on the homepage, then the name of the program).
• “The Ghost Light Series” at White Heron Theatre Company on Nantucket: Halloween special at noon Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 on WNCK 89.5; that story (as of Oct. 31) and all past episodes also available at nantucketnpr.org, whiteherontheatre.org plus on Spotify, iTunes and other podcast sources.
