Saturday Night Radio Drama - Eimear McBride - Mouthpieces

Mouthpieces 

A new radio work by the acclaimed author of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing  and The Lesser Bohemians. Mouthpieces is performed by Eimear McBride and Aoife Duffin.

Mouthpieces divides into three miniature plays, each depicting a fragment of female experience, all of them in the author's vivid, original and sharp-witted style.

In The Adminicle Exists, we hear the inner voice of a woman who saves her troubled, dangerous partner; 

In An Act of Violence, a woman is quizzed about her reaction to a man’s death; 

In The Eye Machine, the character ‘Eye’ tells of her imprisonment, flickering through a slideshow of female stereotypes.

Mouthpieces was written over the course of McBride’s Creative Fellowship at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading. The opening piece, The Adminicle Exists will be published in the Faber Anthology, Being Various: New Irish Short Stories, edited by Lucy Caldwell, in May 2019.Performed by Eimear McBride and Aoife Duffin.Sound Design and Sound Supervision: Gar Duffy; Dramaturg: Jesper BergmannBroadcast Co-ordinator: Jarlath HollandProducer: Kevin BrewSeries Producer: Kevin Reynolds.Group Head of Drama and Comedy, RTÉ: Shane Murphy.

In looking for radio dramas to post I always see what the latest offerings of the RTÉ,  Irish National Radio posts as well as the BBC and the few others who still produce good English-language radio drama for broadcast.  This week it was this series of very short dramas.   It also reminded me of the too-little discussed study,  Celluloid Ceiling that shows that if Women are ever going to achieve anyting like equality in show-business, they'd better not depend on Hollywood to do it. 

Male characters continued to dominate on the big screen in 2018.  While only 35% of films featured 10 or more female characters in speaking roles, 82% had 10 or more male characters in speaking roles.  Females comprised 35% of all speaking characters, an increase of 1 percentage point from 34% in 2017.  Females comprised 36% of major characters.  This represents a decline of 1 percentage point from 37% in 2017.  The percentage of top grossing films featuring female protagonists increased to 31% in 2018, rebounding from 24% in 2017, and slightly besting the 29% achieved in 2016.  Regarding race and ethnicity, the percentage of Black females increased from 16% in 2017 to 21% in 2018.  The percentage of Latinas decreased from 7% in 2017 to 4% in 2018.  The percentage of Asian females increased from 7% in 2017 to 10% in 2018.  However, this increase is due largely to one film, Crazy Rich Asians.  When this film is excluded from the analysis, Asians accounted for 8% of all female characters, only 1 percentage point above the 7% achieved in 2017.

If any of those groups of women are ever going to tell their stories dramatically they are going to have to do it themselves, audio drama is the perfect venue for doing that, all groups that are never going to have their stories told when large money investments, producers, directors, etc. are involved and if they try they'll always have their stories altered to appeal to the lowest common denominator to make money from it.  Hollywood is the exact opposite of what they need to work through.   I've made that same point about any hope for an LGBTQ theater that says something, for small populations, "minority languages" and the such.  If Women, who comprise half of the world's population can't get the movies to tell their stories, to include them, then far smaller groups have little hope of that ever happening.  

Audio drama especially in the age of extremely inexpensive but potentially excellent digital audio production gives people without resources the ability to produce writer-actor centered drama, to say things that Hollywood will never say, to give people Hollywood will never give work to for an audience that wants to or, more importantly, needs to hear.  People need to be able to imagine things they haven't imagined yet, story telling, dramatic presentations can give people ways to think about things that haven't ever been given to them or suggested to them, before. 

I'd tie this in to the excellent book I'm in the process of re-reading, Firewater: How Alcohol Is Killing My People (And Yours) by Harold R. Johnson, in which he emphasizes the importance of the stories people tell themselves about themselves and the groups they identify with.  But this is getting long for these three short dramatic plays.  I will be writing about Harold Johnson's book at length because it strikes me as laying out a far from simplistic but extremely insightful way to deal with one of the most damaging and unacknowledged causes of preventable misery and death among us. 

I will post a second-feature later today, I've got to go sit with a family member.