💥 Hey Boomer!
BOOM! That was a word we saw a lot of in this project, as you can see from the title of this blog post. From the baby booms, economic booms, to even booms in pop culture, the post-WWII affects had a lot of impact on Canadian society. ‘How do we use a satirical radio play to communicate the shifts in Canadian society following WWII?’ That was the driving question for this project. To show our understanding of this question, of course we had to put on our very own radio play. Let me tell you, that is not as easy as it sounds.
First things first, to put on this radio play we had to know the basic information. What were the post-WWII changes in Canada. This was a doozy, because we had to rush to cram as much information into our brain so we could move on to things that took a lot more time. We watched multiple videos, researched with slideshows, and got some information from textbooks. I have compiled all of the information I got into one note, which you can see below.
🏆 Shifts in Canada Following WWII
Now that we had the key information we needed to get this project rolling, we could get started on making our play come to life. When it comes to creating plays or performances, the PLP 10 cohort has some experience. From our Romeo and Juliet Parody Play, to our performances we created for DI, we knew what the overall process would look like, or so we thought. It started off very similarly to our Romeo and Juliet project. We watched a satirical movie on suburban life in the 1950s called ‘Pleasantville’. It was actually very fun to watch since it had Toby Maguire and Reese Witherspoon in it.
We had already been given roles to play in creating this play. I was in our production team, which meant that I had to watch the movie in advance, so I could create the storyboard and the overall plot line of our play. Once we had that, it was up to the separate scene groups to write the scripts in detail.
This is where the process starts to change. The biggest difference was that we wouldn’t have any visual elements in this play. We had to make sure that the audience could follow the story with just audio. So our scripts had to be incredibly detailed and descriptive, and we would have to create both live, and recorded sound effect. The preparation leading up to this play was a lot. The sound team had to run around getting props to make sounds the audience could visualize. In my opinion, I think we did an amazing job of making up for our lack of visual elements.
The live performance itself went pretty well. Since I was in the production team, I had no lines. So that meant I had to help the sound team run around and create the illusion of footsteps, or pages flipping, or eggs cooking. But the people who did have lines did a fantastic job of properly enunciating their words so the audience could understand them. Overall, I think that our performance was a success even though we could have added a bit more historical elements into them. I am honestly pretty proud of myself for taking on a big leadership role in this project, especially since the production team was basically overseeing the entire play-making process.
Now that this project is over, I can finally answer the driving question. ‘How do we use a satirical radio play to communicate the shifts in Canadian society following WWII?’ (In case you forgot.) I think that our PLP 10 class was able to communicate the post-WWII shifts in Canada through our radio play using satirical elements, historical mentions, and the setting of our story. We were able to satirize the naivety of suburban life, mention important historical elements in Canada (Lester B. Pearson, hockey, Viola Desmond, CBC news), and set our story in a way that allowed us to display all of these things in a natural way. I think this was another fun project that we were able to do in PLP to showcase our understanding of the information we learned. It will definitely stick with me now. I am so excited to finally be going to Florida Walt Disney World (spoiler alert). Thank you for reading this blog post, and see you at my next one!
Esther • May 1, 2025