A Brief Martian Radio History and Hiatus Thoughts

Hello,

For those of you who are unfamiliar with me, my name is Wednesday. I am a multimedia artist and generally speaking a human being. Over the past few months, I’ve tried to drastically reduce the amount of projects I’m working on to reflect on and think about Martian Radio Theatre as a whole, thinking on the question what is Martian Radio Theatre?

Martian Radio Theatre is a phrase that has been echoing in my skull since the tail end of my college career. At the time, I was producing DIY student theatre as the Membership Coordinator for the Off-Broadway Players at UMass Lowell. At the time, we were having trouble acquiring space to perform and rehearse in, so I suggested eliminating the need for a theatre space all together and produce radio dramas. We got six scripts in the public domain and went about testing how this might work.

There was something about creating low-stakes art that was so liberating. Without the pressure of a commercial imperative, the goal was simply to experiment within given constraints, such as scheduling, reserving space and figuring out the technology.

My play was titled The Man Who Was Thursday, written by G.K. Chesterton and adapted by Orson Welles. I adapted myself and made it more cartoonish, adding flourishes, slashing passages and mutating the words to see what would happen. Our gaggle of performers would meet regularly and play with accents and cadence and we found our own interpretations of the characters and story. Then a bunch of sound recording students helped us record all the audio in a room full of microphones and after a few takes, that was that.

Unfortunately, I never ended up getting that final file, but I couldn’t say it was a waste of money because no money was spent. And everyone I spoke to had a lot of fun. And those who didn’t have capacity dropped out which was totally fine because we had factored that into the model as is necessary with a lot of voluntary projects. But the process produced questions that I couldn’t ignored. Is this sustainable as a model? Did all my collaborators get something out of it? And were we making art or just playing in the sand?

In 2018, I designed a logo, started a bunch of social media accounts and launched a website under the flag of Martian Radio Theatre. The idea was to have two outlets, the theatre which would be performance and production-based, and then another outlet called The Weekly Eclipse, which would be a collection of local writings. I liked producing and acting and directing because it was action based, and I could shut a part of my brain off and just do it. I was frustrated with writing because I simply didn’t do it. I’d start and hesitate and stop. Open a document, then start a different project, close it and then step away for months. It was like trying to build these two hemispheres of the brain and working to get them to connect and talk to each other.

Another goal was to experiment with organizational structures and to see if it was possible to have an art group that was decentralized that could develop some sort of shared vision organically through sheer intention. This never really happened. Martian Radio Theatre seemed to always be my project and would evaporate if I did not keep it cupped in my hands. Like a vaporous caterpillar waiting for the cocoon.

I decided to revisit The Man Who WAs Thursday and put it on the stage, or some sort of flooring. This story about Gabriel Syme, a poet detective infiltrating a group of anarchists only to find out they’re all detectives chasing each other’s tails, felt like the perfect meta-romp to continue explore these ideas of art making and pursuing an illusive and mischievous vision. And I really wanted to see this thing through to the end and arrive at a sense of completion.

There were many more challenges without the apparatus of college. Reserving space, having extra time, working with peer students, these were all resources that were built into the university setting. Immediately after graduating, I was working full-time in food service and couldn’t possibly schedule what I needed to in advance, as my shifts were always moving targets. But when I got a job as a teacher, I could rehearse regularly after school and plan the show’s run during a vacation week. And so we booked The Worthen, The Luna Theatre and The Eliot Church to perform in.

Working with that cast, building the set pieces, and doing a mini tour through Lowell, were some of my most fulfilling creative months. Whatever frustrations and stressors that may have been present are downplayed in my recollection and replaced with warm summer nights and collective laughter. Although actors being late, I do remember that. Oh and the marketing campaign, Christ, I absolutely hate marketing.

As for The Weekly Eclipse, I let that lie for a long time. I wasn’t sure how to think about it, and I still encountered writing paralysis too frequently to just start writing a blog. I got a review or a short story from a friend here and there, and I could write a thing once in a while, but nothing reliably. That being said, I did have an idea to finally produce a story that had been brewing in my head for a long time. A story called Milo and N1cole, a post-apocalyptic story about the post-nuclear family. I did a few workshops and read through’s of early scripts, but that same hesitation, that same paralysis kept me from proceeding. It seemed like most of my creative work was a kind of advanced procrastination to avoid writing. Producing, directing, acting, these always felt more accessible for some reason. I’m not entirely sure why. That being said, it’s worth noting that I don’t actually know if I’m good at any of these things. I can’t imagine I could be, but I still like doing them because I feel like they’re different ways to get to know one’s self.

Anyway, trying to produce Milo and N1cole, which I would later rename Exterminator, I fell into a deep malaise. Nothing was happening when I wanted it to happen. And I found myself getting exhausted. And as I planned for the future of Martian Radio, the economics didn’t add up to me. Most of the cost was out of pocket for me. I was able to get a couple grand to produce The Man Who Was Thursday and pay all my actors and crew a modest honorarium, but it was still at an overall loss. And my preference was to have the shows free, but I needed to bandage the financial cost where I could, no matter my aversion. I was only making 32K a year, and I wondered to myself, is there a way forward? I read books that suggested becoming a nonprofit and selecting a board of directors and applying for grants, and I thought, no way. Then everything would have that imperative, the need to provide a specific result or yield. It would threaten everything that made the process joyful for me. Is this sustainable? Are my friends having fun? Are we producing art?

I wasn’t entirely sure.

I figured I’d do one more play and see what’s up. This play ended up being Endgame by Samuel Beckett, one of my favorite plays of all time, and after that, I would decide to call it quits or not.

Endgame is a dark comedy about four people trapped in a room waiting for the end. The end of their lives. The end of the day. The end of the play. It’s an absurdist piece that I find really really funny and I figured that this is the only play that I need to stage. It also lends itself well with where I was at. I felt that I couldn’t do another Kickstarter/Patreon drive, or other fund raiser because I didn’t have the energy or (ironically) the drive. I also didn’t feel confident about making a promise about what subscribers or patrons would get out of this. Would they like this four person play, where two of the characters are in trash cans for the entire play and only Clov (my character) could even move about with his master, Hamm, being chair-bound. How does one sell that?

Raising money. No. No, not this time. I’d just take the L and try to keep costs as low as possible. Luckily it’s a small cast and minimal in set design, but I did have to license the play and sign the Beckett Estate rider, so I couldn’t completely fuck with the script like I did with The Man Who Was Thursday.

It was a colder piece to produce as well. Partly because it was much smaller in scale than TMWWT which had a cast and crew of over a dozen people, and also because of the themes, and also because we were rehearsing it in Winter.

As I mentioned, I was also performing in the piece, and my cast mate and I had a crazy amount of line work. For the run itself, my prospective venues weren’t working out for a multi-weekend performance, so we went with a Tuesday through Friday run, with Friday actually being in a friend’s living room. And it was just weeks of going really deep into this beautiful doomed language that seemed to make clear that Martian Radio was ending, which may be an odd way to come to a conclusion but it felt natural. Even now one of Hamm’s lines rings in my head as I reflect on this, “The end is in the beginning, and yet you go on. Perhaps I could go on with my story. End it and begin another.”

At this same time, a production of Endgame was being staged in London featuring Daniel Radcliffe and Alan Cummings. My friend saw it and said it was great. Part of me wondered if this was a timely moment to put on this show.

It was a good run and the living room show was a particularly interesting space to perform in. We prepped the space in like two hours, which was easy enough to re-block since I was the only person moving. And we managed to fit like thirty five people into this sunken room with more people peering in from the foyer.

This was in March of 2020. And while we were able to finish our run, the London show had to stop their production early because a pandemic had swept across the world and the country had entered a total lock-down. And suddenly, I wasn’t just performing as a character trapped in a room with nowhere to go and no end in sight. I had, the week after the show wrapped, in many ways became Clov.

HAMM: We’re not beginning to ... to ... mean something?

CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that’s a good one!

I still remember talking to my co-worker before the lockdown. We were told we could be out of the office for up to two weeks. “Two weeks is a long time to get weird,” he said.

Days became weeks, which in turn became months. And all the while, I could see his face floating in circles as pages flipped and tore away from one of those traditional wall-mounted calendars. “Two weeks is a long time to get weird,” the floating head chanted. “Two months is a long time to get weird. Two years is a long time to get weird.”

Suddenly this thing, this project, which I had every intention of ending, became the only creative outlet through which I could maintain some semblance of structure. It became a life raft in this sea of indeterminate time. I always thought it was backwards of me to start off with staged plays instead of moving into them from radio drama, but now it was clear that if I had gone about this the other way, I might have never had an opportunity to stage anything. Theatre typically relies on congregating people, and that simply was no longer an option.

I wrote a little but not a lot. And I started working on my digital media skills. I tried doing a production of Dracula over Zoom and do all the audio editing myself to ensure I got it to the end, but alas I was too green to see this through. Though I learned quite rapidly.

I did remote projects for other theatres and regular play readings with friends online, and eventually, I got a job in community media. And I continued working on Martian Radio Theatre as a premise through which I could continue to grow my digital media skills, both video and audio production.

We are close to the present, so let’s accelerate our story shall we. I got a grant for Exterminator, but I pivoted to a series of Edgar Allan Poe readings. My writing hand remained frozen. As Covid restrictions eased, I wanted to form community so I organized workshops and mixers and open mics. And then my filmmaker friend and I thought, hey let’s do a limited tv show series called the Impostor Syndrome. It started as an interview series and then we started adding sets, scripted dialogue, animation and a puppet. And then I started a limited talk show called The Martian Radio Show. And I had access to this lovely space, so I wanted to utilize it as much as possible and connect with as many creatives as I could. I felt an urgency to make up all the time that was lost in the years prior. And many things worked out very well, and many projects flopped and died as well. More happened. We released an issue of a magazine that we never followed up on. We did a monologue writing workshop and followed it up with a monologue performance night. The events were interesting to organize because they had so many theatrical elements but were in many respects more casual. The biggest event of 2023 was the Ides of Mars which featured original scripts, improv and a live performance by FomoSurfer. I tried to replicate that by having a series of two-act variety shows over at Coffee and Cotton, and while the shows were strong, I couldn’t consistently whip up rooms that I felt the performers deserved. And then I got very tired again.

Is it art?

Is this meaningful?

Is this economically sustainable?

I took this past fall and winter off to think about this. And during this time, I worked on editing for the Impostor Syndrome and did a few interviews, but kept all that work very minimal. During this time, my place of employment has also been going through a union bargaining process and the political atmosphere of the country has just been absolutely charged. It’s been a tense knot to work through, but here’s where I landed on some of these questions.

Is it art?

I’m less and less concerned about this question as I get older. It’s pretty obvious that people have wildly different definitions of what they consider art. And what I value in the art I consume changes with time. To say for sure is like trying to pin down a shadow. It’s not very useful.

Is this meaningful?

For me, undeniably so. What you see here, is a laboratory. Yes, some of the vials are collecting dust, but the contents of these vials and posts and musings are precious substances. I see before me materials and mediums, and over and over, I wonder what I can do and what can be done.

For collaborators, I can only speculate. Most of my collaborations are with friends who I have long histories with. And they’re often fleeting team ups, though for those who I want to prospectively work with in the short and long term all I can do is be clear about where I’m coming from and what I expect and trust that folks have the ability to decide for themselves.

For audiences, viewers and readers, I’m unable to promise very much. Having to work, I cannot produce in great regularity. Generally I can say I can make the most in the Spring and Summer with some live events in the Fall and very little if anything in the Winter. I do hope you like aspects or Martian Radio as a totality, but a lack of interest in my work or an active dislike don’t disturb me.

Is this economically sustainable?

I’ll keep the Patreon and maybe do some transactional work if only to acknowledge the labor that goes into this, and while I don’t want to beg for support, I also won’t reject help. My big goal in the beginning was to reach a point where I could pay others fairly, but it does feel like a bit of a pipedream in the present moment. What feels practical is to do some freelance work using the skills I’ve developed to fund little projects, but essentially, to keep everything barebones and small. My creative work is a pillow not a parachute.

I’m not gonna break my back chasing grants or some illusive benefactor like a desert wanderer searching for an oasis. I’ve seen people far more skilled and far more supported than me hit crippling walls. And I don’t think I want to sanitize what I do. Not that it’s particularly radical or anything, but I don’t think I could operate from a point of having to make something palpable. If I get a grant here or there that’s great, but it’s going to be because a funder or institution sees value in the work that I’m already doing.

I’m just gonna go with the flow and feel what’s right. Maybe do a workshop here or there. Do miniproductions and take pictures and document what I find. I’m going to continue playing around and hope to find others to create with. I’m not gonna make this project work for me or try to turn it into a golden goose. I’ve felt the siren call of content creation and monetization and it’s simply confusing and unappealing. As someone who has had to navigate financial scarcity for sometime now, I’m not very interested in gambling with my time or other people’s time. I want to remove urgency and desperation from this equation.

This isn’t really a pitch or a plan. It’s simply an intention. We have our seasons, and if a vision occurs to me I’ll let you know. But for now, what I’m interested in is exploring mediums, stories and incorporating my understanding of the world, ideas and politics to make things that folks can interpret. The work should be slow and grounded. Like a plant. Like a little garden that exists simply because things are allowed to exist.

Not a super wild revelation is it? And in a way, it was always sort of obvious. But some conclusions you just need to feel out, and no amount of intellectualizing can force someone to arrive to a new view. You get there when you get there.

There are some things in the works from last year though. Just finishing three interviews that I’m really happy with. One is with a former Starbucks Union Organizer on how to start a union. Our second is with the folk artist Jeffrey Lewis on making lo-fi music and comics. And the third is a chat with a resident artist, May Hathaway, from Bread and Puppet, a political theatre situated up in Glover, Vermont.

The Impostor Syndrome is also deeper into the editing stage. Working on animations, sound mixing and our big cuts, and hope to start incorporating music soon. Still a good amount of work is needed before it reaches the finish line.

So let’s see where we go from here.

One thing I’m happy about though. I am writing now! Slowly. But I’m starting to see that my favorite work is slow work.

Sincerely,

Wednesday