Return to the theatre at the Whiskey Radio Hour

[dorchadas]

Before the Plague Years, I used to go to theatre performances if not weekly, then at least biweekly. Between Locked Into Vacancy, Starlight Radio Dreams, invitations I got from lisekatevans or worlbshiny, public invitations from actor friends on Facebook, or whatever else I decided to see, there was a significant portion of my free time dedicated to attending performances of one sort or another. The Plague brought an end to all of that and indeed to a lot of the theatre companies I used to go see, but one of them survived--Whiskey Radio Hour, a mostly-quarterly variety show. Their tenth anniversary performance was Wednesday, their twenty-fifth show--presumably they skipped a few here and there along the way--and since lisekatevans offered me a ride and worlbshiny was performing the Foley there for I think the first time since the Plague Years began, I arranged my absence with sashagee (who had done lisekatevans's hair that afternoon) and went to the performance over at Chief O'Neill's Pub in Logan Square.

I'd been there once before, to a Shanty Shipwreck show that it looks like I didn't write about, but I had forgotten that it was almost St. Patrick's Day and Chief O'Neill's went all out. It was probably the most consciously and overtly Irish place I've ever been and I've had a drink in Teach Ósta, the pub on Inis Meáin. Fortunately(?) that was just the anteroom, however, the actual performance was in the other room in the back, to which lisekatevans, afschifler and I all went and sat down at the last open table and ordered drinks while we were waiting for the show to start.

Whiskey Radio Hour performances are short one-acts or skits that are submitted to the show, who finds a director and then leaves everything up to them. This time the performances were:

1. Numbers Game by Kat Evans, directed by Hannah Blau: I'd actually heard this one before, back at Gateways before the Plague Years. It's about a future AI dating service that is designed to help form real connections, but it's mostly about the stories humans tell about themselves to each other and what counts as promoting your own #brand vs. lying. The interesting part for me, though, was that because I had heard this before I could compare it to the old performance, which was much more robotic. The actor playing the AI had a lot less emotion the first time I saw it, but this time the interaction between the human and AI was much more playful and I thought it worked better. When the AI kept asking whether the human wanted to cancel, in the original it just seemed like an offhand question. The AI seemed invested in this performance.


2. Peace on Earth by Joanne Freeman, directed by David Krajecki: This one was odd. It was nominally about the relationship between a father and his daughter, and the way that he seemed to keep secrets. It was also about aliens--about a close encounter kind of incident where the father's secret was that he worked at a nuclear silo, not actually as an engineer, but the second secret was that one night there was a ring of light over the silo and all the missiles deactivated, then went into launch mode, then deactivated again. There was no conflict so it was more of a mood piece, but I didn't really get a lot of mood from it either. It was more of a "here's a weird thing that happened to me," which is always hit or miss.


3. Biscuits and Bones by Janet J. Lawler, directed by Alexander Trice: This was a comedy short about a first date in the park where it turned out the woman was a little too into acting like a dog--sleeping in a dog bed, etc.--and she had decided to go on a date with the man because she caught him eating dog biscuits out of the bag. A match made in (dog) Heaven! It was funny, and fit well with "Numbers Game"--represent yourself honestly and maybe you'll find your true match.


4. Alabama Mermaid by Jessica Wright Buha, directed by Rory Jobst: I really liked this one, though the people I came with did not. It was tonally very different than the other pieces, since it was horror and it was mostly musical. A woman walking with her son near the river has her son snatched by a mermaid, and after asking the townspeople, none of whom help, she grabs a mermaid out of the river and asks how to get her child back. The mermaid says the child's soul is free and she'll need to build a new body for it, and so the woman dives into the water and, as her skin turns clammy and her hair grows long and weedy and her unblinking eyes grow wide, the woman builds a new body from parts of stolen children, but her son's soul has traveled on and cannot come back. At the end, all the mermaids sing for their children, implying that all of them were once humans who had children stole and became mermaids in the course of trying to get them back. I always like stories that are about how the supernatural is a terrible thing for humans deal with, and I really liked the music, so while my friends were surprised they decided to end on a musical horror piece I was happy with the placement.

The whole section was surrounded with a framing story by the usual characters about one of their "hexadecaversary" with their wife, and so he needs to get the traditional wicker gift from a "wicksmith." This involved a lot of puns ("Local wicksmith is a basket case") and a call to a Wiccan, thinking they were a wicksmith.

Live Foley was provided by worlbshiny, notable especially for the tearing sound of the mermaid getting body parts created by ripping up a head of lettuce. afschifler originally thought it was cabbage, but, we were told, ripping up cabbage is more for severe pulping wounds and less for tearing ones. She would know.

Both Locked Into Vacancy and Starlight Radio Dreams did not survive the Plague Years, but Whiskey Radio Hour did. I'd been seeing invites to its events for literally years, posted on Facebook by one theatre friend or another, but before now I'd never managed to make it out there. It was so lovely to attend show again!

(I started this before Shabbat, but now I've finally finished it!)