Theatre Odyssey Will Produce Radio Theater

Theatre Odyssey is forging ahead with its fifteenth annual ten-minute play festival. It is preparing to allow its audience to comfortably hear the festival from the safest place. Home.

Board President Michael Bille said the company has been struggling to have its play directors audition actors, rehearse plays, and ultimately stage them in live performance but has been thwarted by the shifting conditions of the Covid-19 in Florida. "At our June meeting (via ZOOM), the board concluded that we would have to await the challenging decisions facing venues as to whether to allow live theater to be produced on their stages," said Bille. He added, "Immediately following the meeting, company Founder Tom Aposporos pitched the idea of radio theater and asked if he could assemble the team to move forward with the Fifteenth Annual Ten-Minute Play Festival as a quality audio event."

Ren Pearson, an actor, director, graduate of Ringling College of Art and Design, as well as a member of Theatre Odyssey's Advisory Council, has been engaged as the festival's Technical Director. He, Bille, and former Board President Don Walker were appointed by the board to procure the necessary equipment to produce high-quality audio production of the festival's eight plays. Bille contacted the playwrights to secure their permission. Pearson has contacted the directors. Some actors had been cast prior to the pandemic (the festival was originally to take place in May), so directors are now completing their casting. Pearson is working with all of them to explain the differences they will encounter with audio-only productions.

"We are fully committed to a safe, socially distanced environment for the recordings," added Bille. "We have purchased microphones with additional lengths of cord to enable a significant distance between actors but to allow them to actually play (speak) off of each other," he said.

The company plans to have few people in a room at any one time and will follow all CDC guidelines. The room, microphones, and recording devices will all be sanitized between each play recording.

Bille said the show must go on and, "it will, and we plan to create a video documentary of this process. It is history, you know, the first time in fifteen years that Theatre Odyssey has produced its ten-minute play festival in a pandemic!"