By Katie Goss ’23
Staff Writer
This semester, the film media theater department adapted to current limitations set by the COVID-19 pandemic and produced “Much Ado About Nothing.” Because the play could not be performed in person or in front of an audience, its director, Noah Tuleja, decided to produce the comedy in the style of a radio play.
Tuleja, director of Rooke Theatre and assistant professor of film media theater, said that as early as May, he knew that the theater would not be able to host 100 to 150 to watch the show even if students came back to campus. With that in mind, he began to reimagine and adapt the season to avoid cancellation.
Tuleja himself is a part of a professional theater company and had just finished performing a radio play over Zoom. He thought it was a good way to keep the season going while everyone involved in the production was still remote.
The initial audition process was done virtually and asynchronously. Tuleja sent out a few different monologues from the play, and the actors had to record an audio clip of themselves voice-acting out the monologue. He then held a callback audition over Zoom and decided on the official cast. Typically, those who choose to audition are asked to bring a different monologue to perform onstage. Due to the time restraints and varying schedules, however, Tuleja decided to send out monologues from the same play instead and let people submit their auditions as audio recordings.
Zoe Fieldman ’22, the assistant director of the radio play, saw this new audition process as an advantage from past processes. “We had so many new people audition,” Fieldman said. “I think it’s a little bit less intimidating. Instead of standing up on stage along with just two or three people in the audience, one of them being Noah [Tuleja], and giving your initial audition monologue, they got to record and send in videos.”
Rehearsals also proceeded in an adapted format. “We started the rehearsal process, which was different than a normal rehearsal process,” Tuleja said. “Usually you read through the play, and then you start at the beginning of [it] … and work through the entire play, scene by scene, onstage — blocking it, staging it, talking about it. And then you get through the whole play, and it’s really rough, and you might run the whole thing, and it’s a disaster show because no one remembers what they did in Act 1 when they got to Act 5.”
The cast would rehearse an act for a few days over Zoom, and then once it was ready to be recorded, they would record it a few different times before moving onto the next one. Instead of running through the whole play or multiple acts in one setting like usual, once an act was recorded and finished, they moved on and did not return to it.
Every act was recorded multiple times to ensure that the final edited version of the audio would sound as good as possible. That way, if someone’s audio cut out while speaking, there would be other recordings of the same section that the sound designer, Ginger Maley ’20, could edit in to keep the act sounding smooth.
Not only did the radio play deviate from the normal procedures of an onstage production, but it also changed the logistics of what actors focused on as a whole. Kylie Levy ’21, who played Benedick in the radio play, highlighted the shift from learning to employ physical characteristics to better play a character to learning to use only speech to do so.
“I think a particular challenge, but one that I really enjoyed [to] sort of work through, was how to infuse Benedick’s lines with color without using your body and being in a physical space. … This really forced me to focus on the exact words I was saying and the way that [Benedick] would deliver them and [how to] evoke certain physical gestures or attributes with voice,” Levy explained.
“There [are] a lot of things, from an acting perspective, that you focus on when you’re doing a radio play,” Tuleja said. “It’s voice and text and speech, and you don’t have to worry so much about the physical choices that you make or a lot of the things that you would do in a normal rehearsal. For me, that was important because I often find when I’m rehearsing with students in a show at Mount Holyoke [that] the voice and speech thing is usually the last thing that we focus on because it’s not really my background.”
“I think it really forced everybody, myself included, to look at the text in a way that you probably wouldn’t just from a time perspective because [time] is really all you are focusing on,” Tuleja continued.
All the actors turned their cameras off on Zoom when recording to give the audio the best chance to record smoothly. Because of this, actors were mostly reliant on speech only rather than physical cues or gestures
“I know in scenes, I had to remind myself to stay super connected to whoever is speaking,” Levy said. “You don’t have a face, and all you hear is a voice coming through a computer, and you’re in your room, and there are so many things around you, so I think the disadvantage in that regard would be staying present in the scene and reciprocating the energy despite not being in person.
Fieldman also spoke about trying to focus on just the speech of the play. Fieldman found this to be more of an advantage, as they have never paid so much attention to solely the oral aspects of a play.
“Because we weren’t focusing really on any sort of body movements or mannerisms, I would frequently kind of close my eyes or sit back, turn off screens and stuff and just listen because that was the most important part of the rehearsal process. … That is all that anyone is going to hear,” Fieldman said. “It was odd to only be focusing on voice for me personally; that is not something I have a lot of practice in focusing on. … I think I tend to direct and focus a lot more on conveying emotion through movement, and so it was actually really [good] for me to get a … chance to try and focus on voice alone because it’s definitely something I’ve been neglecting. So that is a silver lining of having to do this remotely.”
Another advantage to a radio play was that the actors did not have to memorize their lines. They could keep not only their scripts in front of them but also all of the notes they had taken in the margins.
Levy said, “I remember [Tuleja] would say a lot of the times when you get notes, it’s hard to do every single specific one in a take because you have so many things going on. … But in this case, you have all of the notes, you have all of the things that you can pinpoint and you have the words to basically guide you along.”
“Most of the actors didn’t really learn their lines. They didn’t have to because we would sort of talk about things, and they would take notes on the text, which is how radio plays are generally done. … It enabled us to do a much deeper dive into the text and vocal choices than you probably would in a full production,” Tuleja added.
But according to both Fieldman and Tuleja, producing a radio play remotely diminished the sense of community that the cast and crew would naturally develop in person.
“Usually, you get the whole play together, and then you have an opening night, and everybody goes out on stage and it goes as well as it goes. Then there’s a party, and everyone is like, ‘Yay!,’ and there is this sort of camaraderie of everything coming together,” Tuleja said. “For this, the last recording session was just whoever happened to be in that scene. It was a pretty big scene; it was like eight people, but not all of the people. So you didn’t really have that sort of, ‘Okay, we are all done, we’ve all done our stuff together,’ and it didn’t have that kind of release I think, which I think we [expected], but it felt a little less celebratory that way.”
Fieldman was also disappointed in the lack of community. “I find that I’ve made some really close friends working on productions at Rooke,” they said. “Because rehearsals can go from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. normally, a few nights a week, you spend a lot of time with these people. One of the aspects I miss was that bonding that happens, and I think that is something that is really critical for productions to go well.”
Fieldman did express that there was a “good energy” surrounding the cast that they were not initially expecting.
“I thought everyone was going to be really sad about it being a radio play, especially people who are seniors who have been doing this for a while, and this is one of the last shows they will be in. I don’t want to make it sound like there was no community, and so for that, I’m grateful that actors brought a good amount of energy and dedication to this production.”
Despite the challenges of creating a remote radio play, members of the cast and crew are excited to share the production.
“We put a lot of hard work [in], and we had a lot of fun doing this, and I hope the people have as much fun listening to it,” Levy said.
The radio play was split into three episodes, with the first episode containing Acts 1 and 2, the second episode containing Acts 3 and 4 and the third episode containing Act 5. The links to the episodes are on the Mount Holyoke website under the film media theater degree section and are available through Jan. 18, 2021.