There's no romance in television: it's just the Wal-Mart of the mind. Radio is infinitely sexier - Garrison Keillor
The National Audio Theatre Festivals, probably the premier organization dedicated to audio theater in the United States is having its annual festival-workshop, etc. The Hear Now Festival, online this year due to the pandemic. Which seems especially appropriate for an audio theater festival, to me. I've never participated in one, I'm an interested listener, not a producer.
They have published and made freely available the late Yuri Rasovsky's The Well Tempered Audio Dramatist: A Guide to the Production of Audio Plays In Twenty-First Century America which is very interesting reading, covering everything from the best (alas some of it no longer extant) production facilities and departments to far more modest attempts - keeping in mind that as the book is now 14 years old, some of the technology has moved on, it seems to me to be a good book to look through, especially the chapters on writing and producing plays, acting in audio drama, and where to look for further reading.
His list of radio drama worth listening to leans a bit heavily on the "golden age" stuff which isn't my favorite, by and large, but that's one of the good things about this, there's so much of it, so many plays I've read about which I can't hear or find the scripts for, wish all of it was there to be tried. I suspect over the years there were a lot more of those written which, even accounting for the 10 or lesser percent of anything being good, must have some real jewels in the dross. That's what you find if you pour through the scores of forgotten or largely forgotten composers. With TV it's more like a bucket of quarters dumped in a cesspool.
There are a few other online resources:
From Radio Drama Revival
So You Wanna Create a Radio Drama?
From the BBC
Ten tips for writing a play for radio
Tim Cook's website (where I got the Keillor quote from) is worth looking at. I haven't read his book, not yet.
I wish I could find the video of some of those who were involved with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's audio-drama department in the early years, one of the things they talked about is how the head of it demanded that everyone behave themselves, conducting themselves formally while they were working. If there is one thing that is bound to lead to failure it's a lack of adult behavior among those who participate. As I recall he insisted that everyone call each other Mr. and Mrs-Miss (it was before the reform of second-wave feminism took). It's something I surely wish we'd done in music rehearsals, it would have cut out a lot of the tantrums and histrionics and, worst of all, wasting time, none of which helps you make better stuff. I'd never agree to work with someone who wasted time doing that, now. Not twice, anyway.
Maybe I should look into radio opera. which I haven't. If there's an art form that is not going to get much done with the expense of sets, costumes, makeup, etc. it's opera. Especially if you are not a very conservative, "safe" composer. Some fine composers never got to see their work staged, some very good ones only got one production, more rarely, more than one.
You'd think, all these many decades that the performances from the Met have been popular that more people would be writing operas for radio performance. Or the even more readily available online posting of it. It's not as if there's much hope for most opera to get a staged or even concert performance. Given how many people never get the chance to hear their orchestration except as they can manage to simulate that with synth (yech!, mostly) or Garratin (somewhat better) or some other simulation, you'd think they'd like to at least do a simulation with real singers. You might be able to do that if you don't plan on visuals to support you.
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