An audio production is a complicated interplay of acting, directing, editing, and technical wizardry, all of which take time and patience. Ever mindful of our goal of a 28-minute and 30-second radio play (the requirement for broadcast on NPR), our assistant producer timed every scene as we recorded it; then, while the actors waited, producer, editor, writer, and director teamed up to edit and trim each scene as we went.

Each radio play offers its own particular technical challenges. I came to admire the studio crew immensely--I am convinced that they hear a different world than ordinary mortals. Living in a world of sound, they can make out subtleties not discernable to my untrained ears. In "Jury of Her Peers," we needed the sound of footsteps on an old wooden floor. The assistant producer had mined our sound effects library and quickly determined that none of our pre-recorded footsteps had the proper resonance for the Wrights' Iowa farmhouse. So prior to production he went to Vermont to record the sound of footsteps across the floor and stairs of his grandfather's barn. The challenge, of course, was getting this grandfather's cats to stay out of the way while recording was in progress. Ultimately forced to concede the impossibility of this task, our assistant producer returned with a recording of footsteps on a barn floor, periodically interrupted by a gentle meow. A bit of in-studio editing solved the problem (after all, given that Minnie's canary represented the one spark of life on the Wrights' farm, the meowing might have confused matters).

Two days of recording are all the time we have to get everything on tape; after the actors are through, the control-room contingent stays on for two days of post-production work. In "A Jury of her Peers", Minnie Wright's singing had to be woven into the background of several scenes at just the right moment; the technical work required in each scene was prodigious. And of course, there were the last fine edits, the difficult choices required to shave off those final seconds so the play would be the desired length.

The production of a radio play, as I've learned since my first excursion to the studio, is by turns grueling, tedious, and an enormous amount of creative fun. To hear the results, click here.

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