On the air

A new theatre festival in Winnipeg invites listeners to tune in to the expansive world of radio plays, with three productions set to be recorded in front of a live audience at the Gargoyle Theatre this weekend.

The inaugural AudiArts Festival, organized by theatre enthusiast and volunteer Linda Olson, runs Friday to Sunday at the Ellice Avenue theatre.

Olson’s love for radio storytelling originated when she was in her 20s working in remote northern communities where CBC broadcasts were appointment listening for her group of friends.

“It became our big thing,” says Olson, who quickly became enthralled by the potential of the radio-play form.

After she wrote a fringe play in 2018, a drama about dementia called Please Help Me, I’m Lost, Olson, who worked as a registered nurse at the Riverview Health Centre for 14 years, got in touch with local actor Nancy Drake. Drake, a staple on Manitoba stages for over 40 years, provided guidance to Olson as she worked through her script, encouraging her to develop the story for radio.

Drake, who died in 2020, understood the power of radio: from 1967 to 1971, she hosted a weekly folk program for the CBC affiliate station in Sydney, N.S.

Drake, Olson says, encouraged her to develop the festival, helping to devise its concept: giving original, Manitoban productions an opportunity to be performed and recorded in front of a live audience.

Olson’s love for the format was reinforced by Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s radio-play staging of It’s A Wonderful Life in 2018.

This year’s AudiArts Festival will feature three previously mounted fringe productions: playwright-performer Hayden Maines’ Emergency Ops; Gargoyle owner and playwright Andrew Davidson’s Fifth Date; and the Old Elmwood Theatre’s The Condo Down Under.

Despite its name, the Old Elmwood Theatre was actually founded in 2024, says Stephen Gillies, who co-wrote The Condo Down Under — a Faustian rock opera — with Greg Holowka and Kris Baldwin.

“And there’s no brick-and-mortar building, either. It’s a theatre in our minds,” says Gillies, whose company has also recorded an adaptation of Rain by W. Somerset Maugham.

That’s a huge part of the appeal of the format, says Gillies, who worked as a technician at the CBC and CKSB before spending 15 years as a technical writer for MTS.

While working on the technical side of radio, Gillies says he became intrigued by “the power of the voice alone” to carry a story.

“When you listen to something you have to fill in the gaps, see the imagery, imagine how the characters were formed, see the setting, consider the motivations, pay attention to the nuance of voice,” he says, hours before his company’s final rehearsal of the production, which earned a three-star review from the Free Press during the 2024 fringe festival.

That same magic is what’s always gripped Olson about the format, which has enjoyed a resurgence in the podcast era.

In 2023, the internet’s Webby Awards introduced a new category for best scripted (fiction) podcasts, while CBC’s PlayMe reproduces new Canadian stagework on each episode, and a quick search for “old-time radio” reveals extensive troves of midcentury broadcasts available to stream on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Music.

But Olson says what excites her most about the AudiArts Festival isn’t the chance to resurface classic broadcasts such as The War of the Worlds, but to help local companies continue to find audiences and new stages for their original productions.

Each performance will be recorded by the Gargoyle’s in-house technician Rebecca Driedger, after which each company will own the rights to the recording.

Tickets to each performance — Fifth Date (Friday, 7:30 p.m.), The Condo Down Under (Saturday, 7:30 p.m.) and Emergency Ops (Sunday, 2 p.m.) — are $10 at audiartsfestival.ca.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca