Found radio theatre, today at 4

somafm.com is broadcasting a live feed from NASA mission control layered with ambient music. It's addictively ominous. Listen between 4 and 5 ET today for the 39th and final takeoff of space shuttle Discovery.

http://somafm.com/missioncontrol/

(Tuning in to preflight mission audio over the past 24 hours, I've been struck by the tension between the images in my head of what NASA mission control looks like — images from the cold war era, i.e. men in shirtsleeves — and the live voices I'm hearing, many of which are female.)

Combine these sounds (A) with these images (B).

Hotel Savant have a new play running in New York. I was converted by their previous work, The Archery Contest. You can listen to the text and sound score of that play here, but I'm not sure I can describe what it looked like in person. Imagine a cube, maybe eight and a half feet high, placed in the middle of a room. Have the audience sit close to it on all four sides. Now take each of the four vertical walls of the cube and divide them into three horizontal panels. Remove the center panel, so the actors inside the cube are visible from about the waist to the top of the head. That was what act one looked like. For the subsequent acts, have one of the remaining panels raise to the ceiling or collapse to the floor. Also, use any existing surface as a projection screen. If you've read this far, I hope you're booking a ticket to see the new show, Men Go Down Part 3: Black Recollections.

A Radio Play

Many of us spend part of each day in an acoustic world of our own choice, thanks to our little white earbuds. Doesn't it seem that this era would have produced at some kind of rebirth for radio drama? Yes, we have podcasts, and the narrative nonfiction of This American Life is among the most used. But I expected some enterprising theatre person to discover a way to move radio plays back on to the platter of American experience. They never left the BBC, where you can still hear, on any given day, a new play written for the ear.

There are voices out there, calling to us. Karinne Keithley's basement tapes of the mole cabal. Or Hotel Savant's The Archery Contest. One of the most inspiring pieces of theatre for me is actually a concert piece, Frederic Rzewski's Coming Together. (Worth seeking out: the unhistrionic version by California Ear Unit.) And then there is that rare animal, the richly imagined concept album yearning to be staged (or filmed?) — for example God in Three Persons by The Residents, or the new work at hand.

The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman is the 22nd album by Sparks, who are almost certainly the most interesting pop band old enough to be your fathers. While it may overstay its welcome a bit, it's the kind of new radio play I imagined this age would bring: not designed for the family sitting around the radio, but an intimate headphone drama for the inside of the listener's skull. In 2010, is the internal monologue the ideal storytelling medium?