Tucked in the back of Guild Church in Somerville’s Davis Square, the Post-Meridian Radio Players are making quite a ruckus. In fact, if you weren’t looking at the table to the side of the makeshift stage, you might even believe that windows were breaking and guns were firing. The community theater group is dedicated to recreating the golden age of radio, specializing in live radio play performances complete with live sound effects.
“We do shows that are unique, that very few other people will do on stage, because we are only limited by the imagination of what sound can create,” said Jeremy Holstein, artistic director of the group. “We can do a ghost in a graveyard, whereas another theater company would just have to hint at that. We can create that effect because we are just working in your mind, we are working in your ears.”
Source material for the Radio Players’ productions varies between original compositions, recreations of classic radio dramas, and — as is the case with their current production — original scripts of classic stories.
“Can anyone make a cat yell?” asks Jonathan Mendoza, the director of “The Invisible Man,” which will be one of four stories performed by the ensemble in Watertown this coming weekend as part of their anthology “The Unseen World of H.G. Wells.”
A huge part of their work is accomplished with foley, which is the art of making sound effects for film, television and theater. For the Post-Meridian Radio Players’ productions, the foley team meets about eight weeks before a show to develop the soundscape and collect materials to bring those sounds to life.
The group got their start in 2005, and have been rehearsing in Guild Church for so long that they have their own closet dedicated to the art of sound. It has old knickknacks, from rotary phones and dishes to quirkier items, like a rubber chicken.
“Foley is definitely one of my main side hobbies at this point,” said Tori Queeno, one of the group’s foley artists. “And I got into it totally accidentally by joining this company. We all have these skills that we might never realize we have if we aren’t put into that situation. Like, I would have never known that I’m good at making sound effects if I hadn’t decided to try radio theater. And now it’s like a huge part of my life.”
Becoming a successful foley artist requires a certain amount of creativity, an ability to think of sound in metaphor rather than reality.
”We always say that foley has to sound more real than real life,” said Queeno.
The goal is to create a theater in the minds of the audience.
“You can come in, you can close your eyes, you do not have to watch the show. You can listen to the show and you will understand everything that is happening up on stage,” explained Holstein.
The Post-Meridian Radio Players typically put on about three shows a year, but their autumn show is always dedicated to horror.
“I love it when we have some of these more brutal Halloween shows and we have to stab fruit or break up produce,” laughed Queeno. “I love when I’m getting ready to stab a melon looking out at the audience, and can see people thinking, 'What are they doing with the watermelon?’”
The lack of emphasis on the visual aspect of the performance does raise the question: In an age of podcasts and on-demand audio content, why go through the trouble of performing live? According to Holstein, having an audience can take a show to the “next level” with their live reactions.
“This is getting to sort of see behind the curtain of how audio dramas are made,” echoed Queeno. “And we point out to our new foley artists, when people come to see the show here in the church, that they’ll purposefully sit on the side of the audience with the foley table because they want to watch what foley is doing. Being able to see the foley artists make these sounds adds another layer to the storytelling.”
The Post-Meridian Radio Players will be performing “The Unseen World of H.G. Wells” this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at The Dorothy and Charles Mosesian Center for the Arts in Watertown. Tickets are available here.
