CMU School of Drama


Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Playwright Feature: Mac Rogers

Breaking Character: It really feels like now is an exciting time for fiction podcasts or radio plays or whatever you call it. What do you call it?
Mostly I call them whatever I hope won’t scare the audience off! My personal preference is “audio drama miniseries” but I’m never sure people in the US fully get what that is, so I’ve found “podcast miniseries” is more likely to make sense. What I want to get across is that the podcast dramas I’ve written are finite, single-season – not multi-season like The Black Tapes Podcast or Homecoming, for example – and that there’s a definite end-point.

1 comment:

BinhAn Nguyen said...

I absolutely love podcasts. They are so cool and interesting and free! Essentially, they are a medium to tell a story. In the modern world, everything around us is becoming digitalized and podcasts are a prime example of why this change is not bad. It isolates our enjoyment of the entertainment to one sense - our ears. Other than music, no other form of entertainment does this. Podcasts explicitly tell a story without filling in the details for the audience. It's content is allowed to be interpreted in different ways. Rogers dscription of the difference between stage writing and audio writing perfectly articulates the magic of podcasts. Though the listener is being told a story, they conjure up the imagery themselves. There are no restrictions caused by visual necessity. The writer can write without the restraints of practicality. In a play, the audience is subjected to the interpretations of the director, then they create interpretations from the perspective they just watched. Podcasts, simimarily to books, allows each individual to develop their own unique first impression and understanding of a story.

I think there is also something to be said to a podcasts similarities to folklore. In the last, storytelling happened through the use of the mouth and ears. Podcasts is the same thing. It is an interesting mix of new and old since it is one of the newest forms of media but draws from one of the oldest forms.