The fear is all in your head
Actors and sound artists team up for some frightening radio drama for Halloween
"We're going to skip ahead to the dismemberment," director Ari Herbstman said at an Oct. 21 rehearsal. Mare Freed raised a rusty hatchet. On cue, she brought it down viciously - on a pumpkin.
When you're putting on a live radio drama, you don't need to injure actors to stage a brutal murder. The Post-Meridian Radio Players pair voice actors with Foley sound artists to create a world in showgoers' minds.
Stephen King meets Garrison Keillor in "Tomes of Terror III," the fourth Halloween "staged-radio thrillology." The show - which is produced for a live studio audience and will be podcast, but not broadcast - includes an episode of the classic radio sitcom "The Baby Snooks Show," a creepy folktale, and "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe.
House manager Chris DeKalb, 34, said the show has proven so popular that the troupe had to add a fourth performance. "In Somerville there's a lot of Halloween events, and yet we still get the crowds," he said.
"It's just taken off and become a big hit," said Freed, who is the troupe's most experienced Foley actor.
Interest was high behind the scenes as well. About 55 people auditioned for the 21 voice-acting parts, said managing director Neil Marsh.
They didn't have many other options. Despite Boston's status as a big radio town, Freed knew only one other live-action radio lay troupe.
Marsh started the group four years ago after years of radio play fandom that began when he listened to his brother's "Inner Sanctum" LP growing up. Though the golden age of radio has long since dimmed in the United States, radio dramas continue to be popular internationally, he said.
Actor and sound-maker Gilly Rosenthol, 39, pointed out that movies still create most sounds in the studio, even small ones such as footsteps.
Freed thought the time was ripe for a revival. "I think that radio theater is going to have a resurgence because of iPods," she said. "It just opens up a market that for a long time was kind of dead because of TV."
The troupe releases most of its productions as podcasts. But it's more fun to see them onstage.
In lieu of a horse, the Post-Meridian players have a pan of gravel, sandbags, a guy who whinnies, and coconut halves that go clip-clop.
"We really do use the coconuts," Marsh said. "We actually bought a bunch extra to sell at the merchandise table."
Other props include shoes in several sizes, a small door in a doorframe, and Rosenthol's leather jacket. Soundman Brian Rust specializes in falling flat on his face, grinning hugely. When the "Baby Snooks" script called for a pack of dogs, all four soundmen and two actors started to bark.
"There's some showmanship involved in the presentation," Freed acknowledged.
"I think if we were just acting it wouldn't be as interesting," Rosenthol said. To come up with a good sock-in-the-jaw effect, she started "hitting myself lightly in the face."
Absent at Tuesday's rehearsal was the special box they built to properly create the sound of breaking glass. A piece of glass is suspended inside, ready when needed.
He got the glass via donation from a framery after seeking advice on the Davis Square LiveJournal group.
Speaking of LiveJournal, the voice of city spokesman and minor Internet celebrity Tom Champion goes out in this production, not as the snow emergency alert guy but as the beleaguered father in "Baby Snooks."
DeKalb said: "He tried out just like everybody else. It just so happens he had a really good voice!"
No kidding. Champion acted professionally in the late 1970s, he said, working on national tours and making his New York City stage debut at the Manhattan Theatre Club. He gave it up for politics in 1980, returning to the stage only this year with Post-Meridian's sister company, Theatre@First.
Though the visual culture of television and the movies predominates, DeKalb thinks audio dramas retain a special power because the ghost in your head is scarier than anything they can stage.
In "The Tell-Tale Heart," DeKalb said, "people are going to imagine a horrible murder . . . or not, depending on how scared they are."
In fact, some audience members have an illogical response. "About half the crowd tell us they close their eyes," Marsh said. 