GTC Internet Website | Now Playing | Archive | Hyperlinks
The Guerrilla Theater Radio Hour
by Tower
Every
Friday night Guerrilla Theater Company presents "The Guerrilla Theater
Radio Hour" on WRUW 91.1 FM. It's a live half-hour program that features
music and talk, but the real centerpiece of any show are our original
radio dramas that we produce exclusively for this show.
The radio show, which is in fact only thirty minutes long, and our relationship with WRUW can be traced back to late 1992. GTC was in its infancy, although we attracted a certain amount of interest almost immediately, and one of the folks who came out for us from the very beginning was V, who hosted, and still hosts, a morning new music show for 'RUW. Some of us already knew her from when she sold merchandise from a certain store on Coventry which she will probably be pleased we aren't even mentioning what it is they sell. The point is, she loved our work, we loved her, and she invited us to come by sometime and be on the show. We said we could do better than that, and suggested bringing in recorded "hits", she loved the idea, and so we began with some very crude recordings, using a small four track machine and lots of sound effects CDs. These pieces were about a minute in length, most of them were material we had already performed in "Silent" or, in some extreme cases, weren't good enough for "Silent".
V loved the little things we produced for her show, and even told us that the general manager of the station , who didn't like her, loved the inclusion of our short sketches, and she led us to believe that it was our contribution that continued to keep her on the air. As it is now a year and a half later and we don't have our stuff played on her show and she is still on the air every Monday morning, this was probably not the case, although it was very nice of her to let us think it was.
But continuing on here, we were never content to just produce short audio "hits", and in late December of 1992 we made the extraordinary leap of trying to put together a full length episode of some sort, and the product was the very first episode of the singularly disturbing drama, "The Abnormal Dr. Boomer". This show chronicles the adventures of the ancient Dr. Boomer and his attempts to change the world through chemical means. It has developed into a full-blown slam against anyone who see differences in other as social ills that must be "cured" and specifically the Baby Boomers, who use sound-byte mentality and always look for the quick fix in order to get something solved right away (the Viet Nam War, the national debt, drug abuse) rather than taking the rather unpopular route of actually making long term plans and strategies. The very first "Dr. Boomer" episode, since it was the very first attempt at a full-length story, is rather long, there are a lot of gaps between lines of dialog and not very many sound effects, but it was very well written and quite shocking to everyone who listened to it.
The next series to emerge was "The Raghouse", a satirical look not at the so-called "X-Generation", but more at the whole hype that has surrounded it. Every newsstand has a magazine or two devoted to this new younger adult generation and what's wrong with them. "The Raghouse" set in a coffee house and peopled with a variety of shallow, twenty-nothing aged characters, is intended to point exactly what's wrong with the younger generation, and sets the blame squarely on everyone else's shoulders. It too had a fairly shaky start, not really developing a point of view until the third episode, but while "Dr. Boomer's" production values set out to emulate the gothic sound of some of your more classic pieces of pre-WWII radio drama, "The Raghouse's" alternative sound might more accurately be traced to "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
Well, somewhere around the middle of 1993 when the whole Company was picking up and moving down the street, all radio production ceased. It was a probably for the best, as every time we wanted to make something new we had to set everything up on the center of the stage in The Professor Street Theater, do it all at once, and then take everything apart. We had no place for the GuerrillaRadio Workshop (as we were now calling that whole separate entity) to be set up permanently.
Until we discovered The Shower. Our new space, The Actors' Gym, was so named because that was what it had been, an old boxing gym. In renovating the space during the long summer of 1993, we had the distinctive opportunity to dismantle a sauna and a "gang" style shower on the first floor to make space. Down in the basement, off of the newly expanded Boutique there were another sauna and shower, one we use for storage, the other was converted into a state of the arts recording facility which we have found does its job very well. All of the plumbing has been left intact, but Torque spent a few long afternoons constructing a door to close the space off, put in special lighting, nailed some soundproofing material to the walls and, hey, recording studio, one we can use, and then just leave alone. Once a month, on a Sunday, everyone with an interest and the time spends a leisurely afternoon hanging out in the Boutique, drinking coffee, scarfing fast food, and scurrying into The Shower to produce a few new episodes for broadcast.
The Raghouse and Boomer storylines have continued (for the time being, at least) and in addition, two new series have emerged which tell tales of this modern world from a decidedly different perspective.
"The Adventures of Annie Gordon" chronicles the life experiences of Annie, a young department store manager trying to make her way through the professional world in downtown Manhattan. Everything in her life had been normal and predictable until she meets dee jay Paul Travis, when her personal life, petty office politics and the life-threatening illness of a dear friend sends her world spinning out of control. Its straightforward, "realistic" narrative and storyline provides quite a contrast to our previous two, male dominated series.
"Lucy Bontelle, Private Eye" on the other hand is a sooty, hard-boiled detective story. With such characters as the hard-drinking Ms. Bontelle, overweight and underworked policewoman Lt. O'Reilly, the faceless mob boss Betty Tomate and her airhead sex toy Donneyboy, and Lucy's ever faithful and adoring secretary Stanley, there's no question as to what point this series is trying to make. Apart from the gender bending plotline, this series is an authentic take on the radio dramas of old, featuring excessive spoken metaphors and cheesy put-downs.
Any Guerrilla who cares to write for the Radio Hour is welcome to, and one can only presume more completely different stories will emerge even while these mentioned here continue. We've already begun our second semester of broadcast at WRUW, and it doesn't look like they're gonna kick us out yet, so do yourself a favor, and check out "The Guerrilla Theater Radio Hour", every Friday at 7 PM on 91.1 FM. It's the only original radio drama in Greater Cleveland, and not only that, it's also the best.
Last update: October 1, 1994