43 episodes listed below
Old-time radio plays, performed live on a Montana stage.
Plays here are performed and recorded before a live audience at the Verge Theater in Bozeman, Montana, with an announcer, a cast of voices and sound effects made on the spot. One play features a supervillain trying to go straight; another sends a girl reporter to a troubled Montana ranch in 1912.
PRESS PLAY
Play after play starts with the announcement that live radio theater is now on the air, and the phrase is literal: these scripts are performed and recorded before an audience at the Verge Theater in Bozeman, Montana. The stories change completely from one to the next. What ties them together is a close familiarity with old-time radio, down to the announcer, the closing roll call of players and sponsor plugs for businesses that never existed. The Hickory Chickory name turns up in more than one play, once selling condiments and once as the company that invented a make-believe housekeeping perfectionist. The comic plays are pure pulp. 'Old Glory vs. The World of Tomorrow!' bills itself as issue number 17 of Four Star Hero Comics on the Radio, recaps a cliffhanger and finds Mr. Mystery and Lady Liberty hanging upside down over a tank of man-eating polar bears. Mr. Mystery, helpfully, has unspecified and ill-defined cosmic powers. Gerda von Misery wants out of the rule-the-world business and tracks down Captain Overman, the most powerful man in the world, who has retreated to a library and its overdue fees. In 'The Road to H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks!', a being named Belfmodius, inconvenient, eternal and unkillable by his own account, is trapped with an accordion blessed by the patron saint of accordionists. That play was trailed on air as a sixth-season end spectacular. Then there is the Old West. Prudence Pearly, girl reporter, lands in Wildflower, Montana, in 1912, with Barney beside her and a room booked under the Baltimore Women's Bi-Weekly Gazette and Shopper's Guide. The jokes come in quick volleys; a question about reservations gets the answer 'strong ones'. Not everything is played for laughs. 'The Dark Hallway: The Knife' speaks straight to the listener, asking them to picture life as Mac Heath, an ordinary and unhappy man, and then sets up a game of charades with an edge to it. It is dedicated to Rod Serling. 'Tournament of Quizzards!', trailed as a whodunit, is dedicated to Sid Caesar and the writers of Your Show of Shows, and it opens on a grim exchange between a condemned man and a Reverend Mother. That play is credited to Keith Suta, who also takes the role of Mr. Announcer, and its sign-off points ahead to a Prudence Pearly story from Ryan Cassavaugh. The sound effects are credited as live work by Liam Mayer and Kyle Suda, billed at one point as gatekeepers of the nether sounds, with music from Garrett Robinson. The superhero serial makes the clearest introduction to the comic side; the Mac Heath play shows the show's darker register.
Made for: Suits a listener who enjoys old-time radio conventions played for fun, from announcers and invented sponsors to comic-book cliffhangers, and who is happy to jump from a superhero spoof to a western to a suspense tale between one play and the next.
What sets it apart: The plays are performed for a live audience at a Bozeman theatre with sound effects made on the spot, and the announcer, fake sponsors and serial framing are written into the jokes. Superhero parody, Old West adventure and second-person suspense all come from the same stage.
Don't Close Your Eyes is Montana's longest-running and most-popular live radio theatre presentation! Each week during the summer, writer/directors Ryan Cassavaugh and Keith Suta take turns writing and presenting a brand-new one-hour play in a variety of genres from the golden age of radio! Since 2011, DCYE has produced weekly radio plays all summer long at Bozeman's Verge Theater! Each new play is written in just one week previous in order to recreate the vibrant energy and demands of live radio! The genres are as wide-ranging as the schedule is tight: sci-fi, comedy, western, thriller, comedy, and more! Presented live on stage with multi-voiced casts and entirely analog sound effects, DCYE…
A blessed accordion makes a demon dance, and your imagination supplies the choreography.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A villain seeks heroic guidance, workplace status, and control of Apocalypse Incorporated in one crooked superhero comedy.
Gerda's bid to take over Apocalypse Incorporated turns into a comic-villain identity wobble, as her hunt for Captain Overman becomes a request for lessons in heroism.
Belfmodius meets holy water, an accordion, and the humiliation of being managed like a loud household problem.
Belfmodius is built for indignity. The supposedly eternal demon arrives with more than 50 generations of havoc behind him, only to find his authority undone by an accordion blessed by St. Manilus.
A gallows grammar fight gives this western assignment a bright live-radio comic snap.
Prudence and Barney begin in a cleanly absurd kind of jeopardy: balanced on a board over empty whiskey barrels, ropes tied off to horses, nooses waiting at a sycamore, and riders close enough to make the threat plain.
A live radio broadcast spins grim melodrama, sponsor absurdity, and quiz-show confusion into a busy old-radio send-up.
Live radio theater begins with a condemned man hearing a sermon grim enough to be called dark, then slips behind the scenes as Ruby and Gordon push toward a broadcast meant for a huge audience.
A live-radio horror story makes an ordinary man's past feel dangerously close.
Mac Heath dreads sleep because it carries him back to the moment in his youth when he became someone terrible. Once that buried past enters an ordinary house and puts an old face where he least expects it, The Knife turns domestic comfort into a narrow corridor of memory,…
Restored broadcasts, sharp shadows, bright old voices.
A live radio theatre performance featuring a new original play each week, with characters engaging in a dramatic scene involving a mirrored shield and a spell.
The episode follows Ryan, Keith, Trixie, Dr.
The Blackheart Gang turns out to be the all-woman Shakespeare Consortium of the West, and Wildflower's fake outlaw scheme is a tourism play.
Don't Close Your Eyes: Live Radio Theatre!
The German soldier’s pouch contains English-French phrases, and Mac Heath realizes the blade may not be the real danger.
A live radio theatre episode of a superhero serial where heroes are captured by villains and threatened with polar bears.
A live radio theatre episode featuring a comedic courtroom trial in the House of Lords.
A live radio theatre episode presents a steampunk adventure tale about a race around the world involving Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla.