Play for Voices

Welcome

Play for Voices is a producer of international audio drama based in New York City. Since 2016, our podcast and live events have presented new productions of contemporary and classic audio plays from around the world, exploring their aesthetic, social, and political contexts through inventive, multilingual sound design and interviews with authors, translators, and other interesting people. We produce English-language plays and plays in English translation.

Audio drama is a highly flexible dramatic form that encourages experimentation and encompasses narrative, lyric, serials, and standalone plays of varying lengths. These “plays for voices” enjoyed great popularity in the U.S. during the “Golden Age” of radio, from the 1920s to the 1950s, and have remained vibrant in other parts of the world to this day. Inspired by the resurgence of audio storytelling in the United States, Play for Voices aims to build an inclusive audience of listeners for international audio drama, and to promote dialogue among the literary, theater, and audio art communities.

You can learn more about our production team at our Producers page.

Generous souls who’d like to make a charitable contribution to Play for Voices through our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, can do so at our Support page.

Listen here at our Listen page or at Acast.

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Past Events

Doppelgänger Listening Party

Saturday, May 18, 2019 at 7:00pm
Be Electric Studios, Studio 1, 1298 Willoughby Avenue, Bushwick
Talkback and party with beer, wine, and light bites

This listening party featured our production of The Doppelgänger by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, in English translation by Walter Byongsok Chon. The suspenseful and metatheatrical work about mistaken identity was not released on our podcast and could only be enjoyed at the one-night-only event.

The Doppelgänger was directed by Theadora Tolkin (who also composed original music), sound-designed by Asa Wember, and performed by Jimmy Cohen-Cheng, Natalia Hernandez, Bill Keys, Uton Onyejekwe, and JaimeLee Randall. Emma Rivera provided dynamic lighting for this very special presentation.

Stage rights by Diogenes Verlag AG Zürich

Play for Voices Listening Party
(Offsite event at ALTA41, this year’s conference of the American Literary Translators Association)

Friday, November 2, 2018 at 7:00-9:00pm
The Root Cellar at FARMbloomington
108 East Kirkwood Avenue

ALTA41 attendees heard selections from the first two seasons of Play for Voices while enjoying drinks and bar snacks in Bloomington, Indiana’s “subterranean speakeasy.”

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Freedom and Movement

Friday, November 16, 2018 at 7:00-11:00pm
Bohemian National Hall
321 East 73rd Street, NYC
Free and open to the public

7:00pm
Panel: “Europe Then and Now in Audio Drama”

8:30pm
Staged Reading: Illegal Helpers

Play for Voices was part of Freedom and Movement, a multidisciplinary, collaborative event produced with the Czech Center NY to honor the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. The evening included staged play readings, film screenings, a panel discussion, a dance performance, and a visual art installation.

At 7:00pm, we held a panel discussion on “Europe Then and Now in Audio Drama,” exploring the role of audio drama in documenting and dissecting political events, the experience of bringing history to life through sound, and the challenges and pleasures of reaching new audiences. Moderator Jen Zoble, a Play for Voices producer and director, spoke with artists affiliated with three PfV productions that explore the legacy of 1989. Audio excerpts from each production complemented the discussion.

We were especially excited to welcome from Prague featured guests Tereza Semotamová and Barbora Růžičková, the author and translator of Please Enter Destination. They were joined on the panel by Elena Mancini, the translator of It’s Cold and It’s Getting So Dark, and Jocelyn Kuritsky, an actor featured in both It’s Cold and It’s Getting So Dark and I Regret Nothing.

Following the panel at 8:30pm, we presented a staged reading of Illegal Helpers, a German play by Maxi Obexer, in Neil Blackadder’s English translation. This innovative and timely piece of audio drama explores the current refugee crisis in Europe through the eyes of average citizens, drawing upon interviews with Swiss and Austrian residents from all walks of life—doctors, judges, social workers, activists, and students—who have taken it upon themselves to help refugees, even when that means breaking the law. The stories of the helpers are periodically interrupted by the voice of an impersonal “legislator,” who reads out official statutes regulating the movement and treatment of refugees. Through this juxtaposition, the play questions the justness of a society that criminalizes humanitarian actions. Play for Voices producer Katrin Redfern directed this reading as a live recording, to be released in the summer of 2019.

Illegal Helpers was performed by: JJ Condon, Roberto De Felice, Guenevere Donohue, Mariam Habib, Asta Hansen, Wayne Maugans, Joe Primavera, Francisco Solorzano, Harold Tarr, and Pauline Walsh.

Play for Voices would like to thank the Czech Literary Centre, a section of the Moravian Library for supporting Freedom and Movement.