A different kind of holiday special: 5 radio plays by Kentucky authors
There was a time when a holiday tradition was gathering around the radio to hear classic Christmas stories such as “A Christmas Carol,” “Miracle on 34th Street,” and even a radio version of “It’s a Wonderful Life” with Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed for Lux Radio Theatre in 1947.
That tradition returns locally Christmas week this year with a distinctly Kentucky tone as AthensWest Theatre Company presents five short radio plays on WUKY-FM 91.3 Dec. 20 and Christmas night.
“We were not able to produce live and in-person as we had hoped in December,” said Bo List, Producing Artistic Director of AthensWest Theatre. “We had a holiday show planned, and we didn’t want to sit around and do nothing.”
While many area performing groups have returned to live performance, AthensWest has to meet safety standards of Actors Equity, the stage actors union, to address the COVID-19 pandemic.
“AthensWest has been working diligently to meet the stringent requirements of Actors Equity,” List said. “Now that we have, we look forward to welcoming audiences back for to the Pam Miller Downtown Arts Center for ‘Steel Magnolias’ in February.”
For the holiday show, List gathered an ensemble of actors and AthensWest Theatre personnel with WUKY Operations Manager John Lumagui at the station’s studios on Spurr Road to record five short plays by Kentucky authors Silas House, List, Vivian Snipes, Frank X Walker, and Caitlyn Waltermire.
Radio plays were not a foreign concept to the writers. Walker and Waltermire both remember listening to radio versions of mystery plays, and Walker says radio was his primary media growing up because his mother’s church didn’t approve of television.
“We listened to radio and radio plays,” Walker said. “And I remember the mystery theater, it was the big thing that all of us wanted to hear.”
Walker, Kentucky’s first black Poet Laureate and a professor of English and African-American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky, has a ridiculously long resume as a writer, editor, producer, and other endeavors. But “No More Leftovers” will be his first radio play.
“The idea that it was a radio play was the most attractive thing about it,” Walker said. “I think the security that comes with that, knowing that there’ll be an audience because it’s on radio, and I liked the nostalgia connected to it.”
Mark Mozingo, who appears in Snipes’ “It Ain’t Nothin’: Restore the Light” and Waltermire’s “The Holiday Special,” said radio plays were more attractive to many of the actors instead of “Zoom theatre,” referring to one of the many ways theater companies have tried to continue presenting shows during the COVID-19 pandemic. AthensWest has presented a few other programs on WUKY during the pandemic.
The plays went through an unusual creative process, as each writer was paired with a cast who they met via Zoom call. Then they wrote, based on the conversations with the actors and a prompt they were given.
For Walker, his prompt was “Does Kwanzaa still matter?” giving him a chance to address the often misunderstood African and African-American cultural celebration, as well as other issues in the play such as police violence against people who are Black and cultural appropriation. It also serves as a tribute to Keith Griffith, a co-founder and director of Lexington’s Message Theatre who died in January 2020.
Walker said reading the play, he thought that if Griffith were still alive, he would have been in it and, “there was no way I could finish this without kind of some way to have given Keith a tribute.”
“I hope the message in what Frank is trying to say is not lost on people,” said BerNadette West-Fugate, who is in Walker and Waltermire’s plays. “Yes, we’re celebrating the holidays and everything. But also remember these people, remember these incidents. Remember this happened. Remember this continues to happen. Juxtaposed against the other writers ... how we relate to each other at the holidays, and how everyone is really just looking to connect, connects those stories.”
Snipes’ play, with a Hanukkah setting, explores long-simmering sibling conflict boiling over at the holidays, and House’s “The Old Ways” dives into cultural conflicts in Appalachian families as some people move away and others want to stay. One of the things many people involved in the production say they really like is that people who tune in will hear distinctly different perspectives from each of the writers and casts.
While they are all plays that have something to say, including List’s “A War of the Worlds Christmas,” it’s not a downer Christmas, even in Waltermire’s play about “the characters that show up in a diner on Christmas day.”
She said her play was inspired by her own experience working a Christmas shift in a restaurant a decade ago.
“If you think your customers are weird before, everyone gets really weird at Christmas,” Waltermire said. “Like they come in, and they want to like apologize for being there. But they’re still definitely there, and they want to tell you why they’re there, and what landed them in a diner on Christmas night instead of with their family.”
So far, List is the only writer to have heard the radio play performed, because he was directing. Everyone else will hear it like the rest of the listeners, when it plays on the radio. Walker and Waltermire talk about gathering their families around to listen when they air.
“If you’re going to sort of try this, like, vintage medium, this is just a wonderful season to do it,” Waltermire said. “It’s so smart to do it at Christmas time. And I’m particularly grateful, because I will be in North Carolina, with my family in a cabin. So, we get to tune in on Christmas day together, and that’s gonna be a blast.”
But wait. WUKY’s signal doesn’t go to North Carolina. So tuning in will be by streaming from wuky.org.
So, once again, it’s a vintage format, tuned into the 21st century.
‘Last-Minute Gifts’
What: A one-hour program of five radio plays
When: 8 p.m. Dec. 20, 6 p.m. Dec. 25 (all times Eastern)
Where: WUKY-FM 91.3 Lexington
Streaming: wuky.org