Saturday, June 25, 2016

Saturday Night Audio Play - Canadian Gothic

The past few years I've come to really love audio drama, what used to be called radio drama back when radio aspired to be something other than a way to make money and spread propaganda.  I don't mean the "golden age of radio" stuff, though some of that was pretty good, or at least listenable.  In some ways, due to podcasting, it's come into its own as a neglected but really artistic form.   There are thousands of them available online, old and new.  As with all of art,  most of them are garbage but a lot of them are really good.  I would expect it's a lot easier to try something with serious ideas and artistic ambition behind it when you do it in sound.  As I said, some of them are actually ambitious and some of those are quite good, even fine.  Some of them even thought provoking.  Here is one that was broadcast on the old NPR series "Ear Play" from back when NPR had some aspirations to be better than it became.

Canadian Gothic by Joanna M. Glass  


Joanna Glass has written a number of plays, including one I'd love to see or at least read called "Trying" about the judge Francis Biddle as a grouchy old man.  I don't have any idea what Ms. Glass did with him but I'd love to know more about his reaction to having the Nazis whose trial he presided over citing his mentor, Oliver Wendell Holmes, jr.'s Buck v. Bell decision in defending their own extreme eugenics for which they were tried.  I doubt he ever said, though investigating what that might have been like would be interesting to think about.   I doubt I'll ever get to see a stage production of the play, revivals of even interesting plays being so expensive and, so, rare.  I wish someone would make an audio play version.  

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