WUOT's Pierce Gentry sat down with two actors who appear in the show, along with its director. This is the second year the local River and Rail Theatre Company has put on the performance. For a more condensed version of this interview, see this news story here.
Pierce Gentry: This is WUOT News, I’m Pierce Gentry. The River and Rail Theatre Company is putting on “It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play” for the second year in a row. The play incorporates live foley and classic radio acting techniques to make audiences feel as if they’re a part of a live radio presentation of the classic holiday story. I sat down with two of the show’s actors, along with its director, to learn more:
Scott Baron: My name is Scott Baron. I am River and Rail’s technical director, and I also directed this show.
Amara Pappas: Hello, I'm Amara Pappas. By day, I am the marketing associate at Knoxville Opera.
Christopher Pelant: Hi, my name is Christopher Pelant. And aside from performing in River and Rail’s theater production, I am a consultant and a coach during the day.
Gentry: What went into creating this production? How did it come about? What got you all involved as the players and the director? Just tell me all that you can.
Baron: Yeah, I guess I'll start with the background from it on the River and Rail internal side. Last year we also did the production, “It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play” directed by our wonderful Associate Artistic Director Emily Ernst, and the community feedback that we got from this production last year was just monumental. People were bawling in their seats. Just the emotional impact it had, the joy that it brought …
We're always, you know, there are so many types of theater that, you know, you leave feeling a certain way, like your ups and downs, all of this, that and the other, but there aren't … there are shows that you just leave smiling with, like, pure joy, and this is one of those shows. We try to do a lot of the heavy hitting stuff at River and Rail, but also, you know, there is a time and place for just purely joyous theater, and that's why we selected to do it again.
Gentry: Let's turn to the players. How did you all audition for and get the roles and what made you interested?
Pappas: Yeah, this is my second show with River and Rail. I was lucky enough to do a show with them back in April and May, and so that's kind of where I got to know Scott and got to know the other people at River and Rail. And so when this came around, I was super interested in it, and kind of talked to Scott and did some auditions.
And it was a pretty simple process, to be honest, but I was super interested in this show because of the live radio play aspect. I had never done something like that before, and so kind of just being able to think do something outside of the box was really interesting to me.
And throughout my audition process, Scott was so clear about his vision for the technical side of this show and how we would incorporate, you know, live foley and different voices for different characters, and that just drew me in immediately.
It seemed so innovative, and it innovatively … I don't know the right word for it. It's innovative. It's different. Let me use that word. It's different because I mean, live foley has been around forever. But yeah, I think Scott's vision for it is what really drew me in and how he wanted to make it different from last year's production and make it interesting to audiences.
Pelant: This year, I got to audition for Josh Peterson, the founding artistic director for River and Rail, for his previous show, and he instructed me to read and audition for this show, which I ended up doing. And I met Scott at that audition, and he took us through several scenes while we were auditioning. So we got a flavor of a few different characters and gave some different direction, even in the audition process, which I thought was really cool.
I felt like we already had, just upon meeting, that we had a relationship where we would be able to bring out the best in each other. And I think we've done that in this show. Who doesn't want to do – who doesn't want to spend Christmas doing a Christmas play? And so that's something else that drew me in, is the sweetness and the joy, as Scott said, of this play, is, it's a wonderful holiday – It's a Wonderful Life. It's a wonderful holiday experience, I think, for families to come and be able to be a part of a Christmas miracle, which, of course, is the center of the story.
Gentry: Yeah, I sort of want to talk a little bit about that. You know, “It's a Wonderful Life” has been around for a long time. Of course, it wasn't really popular until the 80s in TV reruns, but it is sort of in the cultural zeitgeist of America, I would say, now, at this point. So how did you guys approach turning a very familiar story into something that would be new for audiences, that would be new and fun and interesting for them?
Baron: So this was actually possibly the most reoccurring conversation that my boss, Joshua Peterson, the artistic director, had of, how do we deal with this show, which, as you said, is such a cultural keystone for so many people – so many people have fond memories of it.
How do we, you know, honor the expectations that people have coming to see of, you know, “It's a Wonderful Life?” Jimmy Stewart is, like, incredibly central to this. There's certain characters, just expectations that they will be like they will, how they are in the movie.
So rather than, we kind of had to play with that dichotomy of how, how much can we pay tribute to this movie, meet people where they are and what they're expecting, while still providing enough new nuance and choices in the production to justify doing it and not just showing a movie?
So, yeah, it was, it was that. How do we meet people where they are in their expectations, while still doing something new, as much as we were looking from a holistic standpoint, how do we make this different? There's the next level in which is the nitty gritty. How do I make sure that I'm not just imitating the person in the movie? So I'd love to hear, you know, we haven't had our post show conversation yet, so I'd actually love to get some feedback at this time, what their process was like?
Pappas: Okay, I'm gonna say our running joke: I had actually never seen, “It's a Wonderful Life” until about …
Pelant: We have a running joke that Amara herself had never seen the movie, and that we had to rib her into watching the movie.
Pappas: I have seen it now …
Pelant: So she says …
Pappas: But I didn't grow up with it. And so when I was going through the audition process, I was like, you know, it's probably about time to watch this movie. And I'm really grateful for that perspective, though, because I did not personally have a lot of expectations coming in, and I was able to kind of find the character of Mary on my own before watching the movie.
I'm very thankful for that, because I think Mary is a very complex character that can kind of be put into a box sometimes. But on the flip side of that, one of my favorite things with this show has been we've been able to play kind of two characters, because this is a show within a show where, in the 1940s we are these actors doing the live radio production of “It's a Wonderful Life.” So I get to play Sally Applewhite, the 1940s actress who won ‘Miss Ohio 1943,’ playing Mary hatch Bailey.
And so I think that's a really neat way to do it too, is you get to show people how an actor is approaching a character, not just yourself. And so when you're not at the microphone, you get to kind of go into that second level of your character and get to be the 1940s actor and develop relationships outside of just the characters within “It's a Wonderful Life,” and I think that really differentiates it from the movie, because it just adds a whole, a whole nother layer for the audience to watch and dissect.
Pelant: Yeah, I had seen the movie growing up, but I hadn't seen it in a number of years. And after we got into the rehearsal process, and I had already kind of figured out what I wanted to do with a few of the voices, not all of the voices, but a few, I went back and watched the movie. And it shocked me how much of the dialogue in the play comes straight from the movie, that we are literally saying lines that are in the movie.
And so I'm glad that I didn't necessarily know that right out of the gate, because it allowed us to find our own tone, our own way of speaking, but at the same time, like Scott said, we also want to be able to honor it. So there is that taking in and saying, ‘Okay, well, what was the perspective of these actors, and what was the perspective of these characters? And can we fulfill that simultaneously bringing maybe a new voice, especially as we're doing literal voices, a new voice to these characters?’
And because it's a radio play instead of a movie, the radio play allows you, as Josh and Scott pushed, especially with some of the characters that I'm doing, you know, to not necessarily be cartoon, but certainly be a lot more –
the way that you would think of the villain being the villain. And make sure that you know that the villain is the villain. Make sure that you know that the good guy is the good guy.
Sometimes on film, that just presents itself based on what you're looking at. But in radio, you really have to make that clear. And then I got to play a character that's not in the movie, Freddie Fillmore, who is the host of this radio show.
So that was really fun, because that's an element that's not in the movie, and an element that I could bring holistically to the show by itself. And like Amara said, all of us getting to play those character – that's something that Scott really pushed us to do, is make sure you remember you are these radio characters.
So that's the first level: playing these, these voices. And I think that was a really fun way to attack the show and bring out some of those nuances, and bring out some of those characters that, like Scott said, are known but need to be different than what the movie is, so that people are having a new experience. But as Scott said, paying homage to what they already know.
Pappas: Now it's going to be really easy for us to be those obnoxious people that when you're watching the movie with someone, you say all the lines on the screen, because it's all in our heads now.
Pelant: It is, absolutely, yeah.
Gentry: I wanted to turn to the complexity of this performance, and something that I think a lot of theater goers are commenting on is the multi-layered complexity of it. You are an actor, playing an actor, playing a character in a radio show. So is that a bit of a challenge for you? And how do you approach that? And how do you maintain going into character and then going into a character as another character?
Pelant: Well, I think we all have multiple personality disorder, now, I think that that's a definite. But jokes aside, I think that establishing, at least for me, and Scott and Josh both helped with this, but establishing a vocal pattern, establishing maybe even a look on your face, you know that is different character to character, so that the the audience knows that you're kind of popping in and out of different characters.
I literally have scenes where I'm talking to myself. So when I say multiple personality disorder, I mean it, there's, there's, there's lines, you know, as a, even as a stage actor, there's lines where you're just, you're talking to the other person, and you're waiting for them to respond and hopefully listening to them.
Well, in this characterization, there are times where I'm listening, literally talking and listening to myself, which is a unique experience. And as I've said before in other interviews, it's helped to stretch me as an actor, to get to play both parts simultaneously and and just put on different parts in the same play without the use of makeup or costume, you know, to help you. I'm in the same Freddie Fillmore kind of tuxedo, festive tuxedo the whole time. So you really have to lend the voice and the facial expressions to let people know what character you're moving to now.
Pappas: Yeah, and I think another aspect of that, it's the relationships between the actors. And I say that because “It's a Wonderful Life” is full of iconic relationships. I mean, you have the friendship, I guess, between George and Clarence the Angel, then I can speak more on the iconic relationship between George and Mary. And so how as an actor, do you dig into that relationship between George and Mary, while also establishing a relationship between your actor, like second your first level actor? So I have Sally and the guy playing George …
Pelant: Guthrie Butler , shout out to Guthrie.
Pappas: Shout out to Guthrie. So it's – you have to establish three different levels of relationship. In this show, you have to establish the relationship – I'll continue to use Mary and George as an example – between Amara and Guthrie: How do we interact? And then, how do Sally, my character, and Jake, Guthrie's character, interact? And then, how do Mary and George interact?
And that is so much more complicated than I ever imagined coming in, and that's been one of my favorite things of the show, is dissecting what that looks like and being able to have those conversations. Because I think a big thing with theater is, as Christopher was saying, we have kind of the physical attributes of how to portray ourselves and the facial expressions, but at the same time, when we're on that stage living these characters, the audience can feel that, no matter what we look like, if we're living those characters, they can feel that, and it helps their experience.
So how do you live three different experiences at one time? It's terrifying.
Pelant: One of the things that Scott did beautifully was he has us do a, what's called a soft opening, where instead of the play just opening, we actually come out as our actor characters.
And in talking to people who have come to see the show, they've all said how much they love the soft opening that we're interacting with them a bit and interacting with each other on stage as actors, not with dialog, but just as the actors themselves on stage.
And I've gotten many comments from people coming to see the show that they really love the soft opening aspect, because it allows them to feel like they're really in the radio broadcast live audience, that they're really seeing these actors start and, you know, we come in with coats and hats on, as if we've just come out of the cold.
You know, we're in New York. We're saying it's in WBFR Studio A in Manhattan, New York. And I think that that gives the audience a very real feeling that that's where we are, and that's where they are, and it really kind of sets the course for the rest of the play. So I think Scott doing that was wonderful and really useful in helping to create the world right from the beginning.
Gentry: Scott, I would like to turn to you for a moment. One of the other big aspects of this performance that I think maybe people might notice, but they might not talk about as much, is the excellent sound design. So could you talk to us a little bit about what went into designing the sound for this performance, and how you capture that very unique 1940s radio sound that we don't have anymore?
Baron: All credit goes to the wonderful Chance Beck, who is a grad student here at UT. So something that we decided was in playing with changes that we can make to last year's production to this year was that I really wanted to play with the idea of compression.
Because back then, anyone who's interested in the technicals, highs and lows are kind of gone. They only really had mids. So we kind of cut, if you look at the EQ, if a sound wave is just like, if you think of like a sheet of paper with the entire bottom half colored in, if you got rid of the first and last third, and it was just the middle, that's kind of a visualization of what the sound is doing, and that gives it that compressed feeling of being 40s and 50s.
And it was actually quite a journey to figure out how to do that, because in a live setting, we found it actually, it can start to cause a headache after a while. So we were like, halfway through performing a technical rehearsal, and the lighting designer comes up to me and goes, ‘I have a headache. I think it's the sound.’
So we had … there was a lot of experimentation with, where's the sweet spot of making it distinct? Right from the get go, that we're doing something with this to make it sound like it is from the period, to give that appearance of it being a period microphone without causing any fatigue to the audience, so that it's not unpleasant to listen to for the hour and a half run of the show.
Yeah, and I think it adds, especially to those quiet scenes that come to my head of a lot of Mary's lines, the famous lasso the moon scene, it just immediately shoots you into … you can just close your eyes and literally like picture yourself in a ‘40s, ‘50s household sitting around the radio listening to it.
Pelant: And as actors, we were in a position where most of our teachers have really hammered into us that you need to hit the back wall with your projection. I mean, that's something that you cannot leave college without, you know, with a theater degree without hearing that from every teacher that you've ever had.
And especially Guthrie and I are very loud people, especially on stage when we're asked to project. And to think of another scene, I was thinking about the Guthrie and Celeste scene, where he's doing the Zuzu scene.
Baron: Yeah, yes.
Pelant: It's a scene with his daughter, and it's a very quiet moment, and it was a big deal for Guthrie, who can, who can definitely belt it out there, and he's relying on the mics at that point to have a very soft, more cinematic moment.
I would say a more sound generated moment, like we are right now with these microphones, as opposed to a theatrical experience. And it was really neat to be able to do both of those sides of the performance.
Baron: I'd say that was probably, looking back, the biggest hurdle that everyone had to go through was figuring out mic discipline: how far to be if I'm speaking at X volume, I should be so many inches away if I'm quiet or I should be closer.
Pelant: I’m not even sure I have it down.
Baron: But an attempt, like attempting to maintain consistency across the whole thing. Because that was the thing, is we got to do so much playing, like you were talking about the three different layers of acting. However, there were some constraints. The biggest one probably being, what does really holding true and fast to we are doing a radio play, how does that impact your performance and really ties you into the microphone?
The thing that we were talking about was the microphone is your scene partner. In the show, there are a few scenes that require the emotional impact of eye contact – that we have eye contact between two actors playing a scene – but most of the time they're just staring right out at the audience into the microphone.
But that allows the audience to see all the wonderful facial expressions that they're doing. It can help, especially with the, as Christopher was talking about, those quick transitions from character to character, being able to pivot in a very small area. So yeah, that was .. it was fun. It was a journey. And I'm happy with where we ended up. It's, it's unique.
Pelant: It's very unique. It's a unique experience to be in it and see, I think it's a unique experience to see it and it's, it's been a fun holiday experience as well.
Pappas: We've always said we just get to do Christmas every day, which is such a fun … I mean, like from where all of our ages, where we are, it's, you get, don't always get to do Christmas a whole lot anymore. You're busy. And we get to show up and just do Christmas and give people Christmas, and I think that's such a joyful thing.
Pelant: A Christmas miracle , an angle, and two Christmas trees in the background, and we're doing it every day. It's really cool.
Gentry: Did any of you have prior experience with foley work? How did you learn it? And what is it like performing it live on stage?
Pappas: I think that's one of my favorite parts of the show. I think it's so fun. Approaching it from, like, a script study standpoint, I almost had to think about the foley as another line and say, ‘Okay, I need to go make my door sound now,’ and do stuff like that.
And it's so fun because bringing in that idea of that first level of character we're playing the 1940s actors, that's when you really get to tap into it. How would this actor approach this fully sound? And that's really fun, but as just a person in current day – being able to do foley – I think it's so cool to be able to tap into, like you said, we don't use that anymore, to be able to tap into kind of an older tactic.
Baron: So what I will say is, if you're ever curious, listener, go look up videos of foley artists. They are still around. And that was part of – I was fortunate enough when I was in school to take a sound design course where our end of the year project was foley to a short story. But I think –
Pelant: That's cool. I'm gonna ask you about that later.
Baron: –that informed a lot of my standpoint of like, how to use it in such an interesting way, in the decision to highlight the unusual ways in which we achieve certain sounds. Like, there's a great video of “The Revenant,” the movie, when they're doing the foley for it.
Because if you're listening to a movie, most of the time, you're not actually hearing the sound effects of what's being visually recorded. You're hearing a foley artist in a massive studio with this movie playing in front of them. Like when Leonardo DiCaprio is walking through the snow, they are stepping in a giant thing of corn flakes, like we do.
Pelant: That's one of the noises, not to interrupt, but that's, that's literally, most people's favorite moment of foley in the show is Guthrie, as George, he walks through the snow and he's running through the snow, and he runs through a pan of corn flakes, and everybody just loves that part. Like, out of all the foley, yeah, sorry to interrupt.
Baron: No, no, no, and that's, that's part of the goal. Was, like, we want it, and I don't want to dispel too much of the magic, because you could, you can come see the show, but figuring, like, all the unique ways of like, oh, that's how you do a train like, with nothing like, with no train. Oh, that's how you do running through the snow. Oh, that's how you can make ice cracking like, and I'll let – Christopher, do you actually get to do too many?
Pelant: Yeah, no, no. So what, the way I approached it, funnily enough, I'll totally out myself, was I didn't approach it. I got to the part where it's a line. Now, like with it's a separate set of lines when you're doing your foley, but as at the very beginning, I remember being in rehearsal, and I became a little boy again.
And I was, I said to Scott, I said, I saw this, this thing that's our quote-unquote ‘wind machine.’ And I won't give too much away, because we want you to come see the show. But there was our little wind machine. And I said, ‘I want to do the wind machine. I really want to do the wind machine.’ And Scott was like, ‘Okay, well,’ like, like, talking to a child, ‘okay, we'll see who's available.’
And and then it was literally, like, a week later, he was like, ‘All right, it seems Christopher's available, so he can do the wind machine.’ I was like, ‘yes, I get to do the wind machine.’ So I think I approached it like a little boy being excited about, like, making cool sounds, the way that my …
When my nine year old came to actually see the show, he was so interested in – he was more interested in the foley tables than the actors. There's no question. And so I came in it from that perspective. And then, once you realize that you have a part of what's going on where you're literally affecting what's going on in the drama, or the theatrical experience of the play, like Amara said, it becomes one of your lines. It becomes something that you're doing to help tell the story.
So I got, I went from the little boy to be the actor. And then, of course, to our third level of being, Freddie Fillmore, the host, saying, ‘Oh, I'm doing this for the show's purpose,’ if you know what I mean.
And so that was a really interesting metamorphosis from little boy to the host of the show. You know, perhaps doing some of these live foley things that he might do weekly.
Baron: And I'd say it was a developing process. Like it was never, I don't think the way that we were doing any of the foley noises the first time we did that is how we've done them now. It was a constant learning curve.
Like, the thunder went through many, many, many, many iterations, and I'm happy with where it ended up. But I think we – I found that out, like, by messing around with Chance, our sound designer, like, the day before opening, he and I were just like, ‘how can we get this to be better?’
So we were just trying so many things, and then we finally got it. And, yeah, I think it's it's been fun.
Pelant: Yeah, no, the foley is definitely a fun aspect, and the audience gets revved up every time we do something. ‘Oh, well, what are they doing? How are they doing that?’
Gentry: What are each of your favorite moments and why?
Pelant: Now, we didn't get a preview to this question, this is off the top of our heads. Anybody else?
Pappas: I might have one? I think maybe I'll like regret, not regret it later, but think of a better one later and be mad at myself. But my favorite moment right now is the iconic scene where George comes to Mary's house, and Mary's mom is yelling down the stairs, and Mary is getting really frustrated with George, and George is just trying to avoid all of his feelings.
And I just think the writing in that scene and the awkward tension between, you know, two young people that are in love but don't want to admit that they're in love. It's just, it's so funny to me, and I love playing that scene every night. It's my favorite one. I get so excited to get up there and do it.
Celeste, who plays many characters, but in this scene, Mary's mother –
Pelant: Celeste Pelletier, shoutout to her –
Pappas: Sorry, I keep not saying –
Pelant: I'm your, I'm your color man.
Pappas: Celeste Pelletier plays many, many characters, but in this she plays Mary hatch – not Mary Hatch, Mrs. Hatch – and she's just hilarious in it. That's my favorite with the dynamics and playing to the audience. And I think it's such an iconic scene that people look forward to seeing the scene, and I love being able to present it to them and hopefully surprise them with the way that we do it, in a little bit of a way.
Pelant: And to color what you said even more, like, that's a great example of what we started talking about, which is Celeste is with you, creating a moment that is iconic and yet completely new from, from where the movie is, and Celeste is hilarious in that scene. You gotta come and see it.
Pappas: Yes.
Baron: I would say my favorite part speaks more to the economic side of things, maybe. But it's the speech that George gives in the boardroom, the line, our Associate Artistic Director, Emily, said it last year. The line, “do you know, how long it takes a working man to save $5,000,” has even gotten more true, and the amount of money that that is has decreased.
So I think that this show has so many like, just beautiful moments. You know, the whole story is just choosing to live when you feel like you might not want to. But the the the root of that, perhaps the economic side and the community support side of that, and what banding together can do to support those in your community just hits every night.
And it's not necessarily an applause moment, but if you were to watch the audience when he's delivering that speech about looking out for your community, running a business with good ethics, supporting one another – Everyone in the audience is just nodding along.
Pelant: It’s as true today as it was back then.
Baron: Yeah, it's true today. It's, it's, but yeah, that, that line, “do you know how long it takes a working man to save $5,000” has only gotten more true.
Pelant: Yeah.
Baron: And that, the solution that it poses at the end of, you know, your community coming together to support you, that it just hits hard, I think for so many people, specifically the type of stress that George Bailey is having, you know.
I think a lot of us can empathize with the depression that he feels and the strife that he feels with that. And that moment is just, yeah, it's a great moment, and speaks to the timelessness of this story.
Pelant: I'm gonna cheat, and I have like three different things, but I'm gonna go really fast. So my first one as an actor is because Freddie Fillmore is not in the movie. The opening of the show where I get to introduce everybody is really fun. I appreciate that part of the show, because, like I said, it enters us into the world, of us being in this 1940s radio play, which makes it different than “It's A Wonderful Life,” before we get into that story.
So as an actor playing these moments, I really enjoy that as something that stretched me, obviously, like I said, talking to myself. That's a rarity and a strangeness, and something you don't often even do in shows. And so that's that's really stretched me as an actor.
But what's interesting is Scott has continually asked us, in a wonderful directing way, that if we're not – because we're doing a radio play and people are watching us on stage, and we're on stage for the entire just over 90 minutes of the play – There's no intermission.
We're on stage the entire time. If you're not talking or a part of a scene, you should be watching and you should be, like especially as Freddie, the character Freddie that I'm playing. One of the suggestions was you've probably hired these actors to come and do this radio play with you, and so that's the character that I get to play in the moments where I'm not speaking and I get to sit back.
I'm watching these actors, and I'm watching the real actors get to play these characters in the show. And so I'm watching them both as Christopher, and I'm watching them as Freddie, and that's a really enjoyable moment, because I've got a front row seat to these people performing this wonderful Christmas play that we get to do, like we said every day.
And so it's a literal front row seat where I can just relax for a second and enjoy the moments that they're having, and I'm a part of it. And like I said, that I have a front row seat to it is a really enjoyable part. And then I'll finish by saying the little boy in me loves the fact that I get to do three pages of the wind machine like this, like we talked about before, I literally have three pages of getting to do the wind and it was the thing my nine year old son, Caden, was the most interested in, that in the siren like those two things the most, the loud siren and the wind machine.
And then, of course, what was he stepping in? What was he stepping in? Corn flakes. But getting to do the foley brings up the little boy like I said.
Gentry: How do you think River and Rail is uniquely positioned to present this production?
Baron: One of the great benefits of River and rail is our space, in that we are one of the only, you know, 100 to 200 seat theaters in the city of Knoxville that is regularly producing theatrical work. Everything we do is with the mindset of intimacy in that, you know, something like the Clarence Brown, the Tennessee, the Bijou, specifically, Clarence Brown's main stage, there's that distance.
But here we have … it informs all of our productions in the way that we have to think about the audience isn't 30 feet away, they're like, at times, six feet away. So it allows for, maybe even subconsciously, a more intimate, a more just closer style of acting.
I will say, as well, with our smaller size, it allows us to be more agile in the shows that we present. Our artistic director, Joshua Peterson, is an excellent person at picking our season. He's working on it right now for next season, and it's … everything we do is informed by how intimate we are with our community, with the performances that I think it draws out of everyone.
I would imagine that if we were to do that, if we were to do this production at the Tennessee or the Bijou, both of your – I'm talking to Christopher and Amara – they would be heightened in the sense of pushing the performance.
Pelant: It would be so wildly different. I haven't really thought about it from that perspective of, how would it differ. But I have thought about, not to interrupt, but I have thought about how intimate the space is for the production that we're doing, and how special that is.
You can see people crying. I mean, we can see people reacting to us, and they can see us reacting, as opposed to maybe just a character of reaction. They can actually see what we're going through on stage. They can definitely see the foley and what we're doing much better than you would at a distance, at a proscenium stage, and at times we even create, if we have enough audience members, like a thrust stage where – meaning there are people on the sides and in front – as opposed to proscenium, where you're just kind of at a distance.
But I think, and this is what I've gotten back from family members and friends that have come to see this show specifically, and “Our Town,” which was the show River and Rail put on – since we’re talking about River and Rail – right before this. That was their fall show – is that it creates, and you said intimate, but it creates a level of intimacy where the people feel like they're kind of way more a part of the show, rather than just watching something, they're a part of the show.
And I do think that that transfers in, especially in this show, because we tell them, you're part of a live radio audience at this broadcast. And I think they believe us more because of the intimate space of River and Rail for this production. And I can't imagine now that it was set doing it at a distance.
Baron: Yeah, I think that was part of what, when I was asked, like, what is how are we gonna make this different from last year, I was like, let's include the audience. Our space is about applicable to what the studio would be for a live studio audience. We tell them, you know, the listeners at home are listening for your reactions, and I totally think you’d agree, is that, you know, at first we were like, are they gonna do it when we asked them to make like party noises and sing along with us? But they do it, and they do it like joyously.
Pelant: Well, I make them do it.
Baron: We do, fair enough. We do cue them. But that was another way that we were like, how can we serve our community? And part of it was, let's find a way to invite them in a way that does not require getting up on stage. Come, come perform with us. Come be part of this experience. Yeah, I was thinking back on last week, Sunday. Or was it Sunday? They were singing in parts for old legs. It was beautiful.
Pelant: It was – it was beautiful. And because you asked about River and rail, and I know we're we're talking about “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and we want to, but because you're talking about River and Rail, I can even speak to my experience in the last show in “Our Town,” when they do the funeral, but at the end, I mean, I really felt like I was there as a part of that kind of that that funeral procession, more or less, as opposed to seeing it at a distance, it makes it less like you're watching a television screen or a play, and more of like you're having an experience.
And I think that the live broadcast atmosphere of “It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play,” dictates and speaks even more to that, that the people really felt like they were there for that experience. And it was really neat, and it's really neat to think about it from that perspective. And I think River and Rail’s space dictates that closeness, that intimacy and that availability to feel like you're really a part of what's going on, as opposed to just watching something at a distance.
Baron: So the moral of the story is, if you've ever had stage fright, but you want to be in a show, come to River and Rail.
Pappas: Well, and I think, I think, really quick, to hit on your point of community theater and the performing arts in general, especially here in East Tennessee and in Knoxville, it is such a strong and tight knit community. And I think doing a show about community during Christmas time, it can just … it's such a busy time.
It's such a busy life, such a busy world. It can really remind us of the community that we have, and especially for lovers of the performing arts and people that are either loved to do it or love to come to it, just reminding us of kind of what's right in front of us. And I think with River and Rail, they're always, like you said, producing shows that kind of make us think critically and think about the world around us.
And I think this show specifically does that in such a way that it's so simplistic, it's such a simple story, until you really dig into it, and you realize, whoa, this is still just as applicable today as it was when it came out.
And I think it's going to be applicable forever. And I think why it lasts so long, and I think River and Rail is perfectly poised for that because of the seasons that they choose and their spot within this performing arts community, and kind of their history of what they present to audiences.
Gentry: Is there anything that you think I neglected to bring up, or anything that you, any of you would like to hit on that perhaps we didn't discuss?
Pelant: Scott, any business details that we missed?
Baron: No, I think we hit all of them. We run through December 22. Any day that is not Sunday, the performances are at 7:30, doors at 7:00, and on Sunday, doors at 2:00, performance at 2:30.
Pelant: Also, this is a cast of five. So I wanted to give a shout out to Brady Craddock, who plays Clarence the Angel and others in the show.
Pappas: He’s hilarious.
Pelant: And he's wonderful, sweet and hilarious all at the same time with his different characters. And so it did take all five of us, really, you know, putting our heads together with Scott to make this thing be as sweet and joyous of a holiday experience as it is. And so I just wanted to make sure that all of us are mentioned. Unfortunately, not everybody could be here today.
Gentry: The River and Rail Theatre Company will be presenting It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radioplay until Sunday, December 22nd. More information can be found at riverandrailtheatre.com.
This interview and transcript have been lightly edited for the sake of clarity.