How can we use a satirical radio play to explore the changes in Canadian society after WWII? Was our driving question this project. Now you may be wondering how in the world can you even connect a play to the 1950’s and the answer is Plesantville. Now before we jump to that we have to talk about what we were even learning about
Post WWII culture was mainly focused on the baby boom and the revitalization of many cultures. After WWII many people were still recovering from the tragedies that many families faced, the whole world was completely changed and the process of rebuilding would take years. So many people wanted to enjoy the time that they had so culture flourished. Stars like Elvis Presley became huge and the recent introduction of the at home TV became a huge focus of the world. But another thing that was quite popular at the time were radio plays.TV’s weren’t quite something everyone had access to but almost everyone had a radio.
A radio play is exactly what it sounds like, a play on a radio. Our class’s assignment was to create one of these radio plays but to get an understanding of what we wanted to base it off of we watched a movie called PleasantVille (if you haven’t seen PleasantVille I would highly recommend watching it) . Basically the premise of the movie is that two siblings get transported into this 1950’s black and white TV show called PleasantVille. When they get to PleasantVille they realize that they have replaced the two main characters of this show. In this world there are no colours and everything is eerily perfect. As they go throughout the movie they realize that the changes that they are making to the town is making colour creep into the world. After a while there is a clear line inbetween the “coloured people” and the people who don’t want to to change. At the end of the movie they whole town turns coloured and they are able to travel around the world.
Our class basically created a spin off of the movie but tying in our own elements. We were divided up into groups based off of scenes. We also had a production team who decided how the story was going to go, and an audio team who created all the audio for the play. I was assigned as a DRI for my scene which was closer to the end. I was proud of myself as a DRI and I think my group did a good job of figuring out our script. I wrote the script for my group which was very fun because I actually really enjoy writing scripts.
Our story stuck pretty close to the idea of PleasantVille but instead ours was about a place called HappyTown and instead of the mayor being the villain we made it the principal. We also made it so instead of it being colour that was representing the change it was the knowledge of the outside world that was the line inbetween people. Our leading siblings were called Oliver and Olivia, but when they were transported into HappyTown they were called Billy and Wanda-Faye
When we got to assigning roles I requested a larger role and I was given one of Wanda-Faye! Once it was finally performance day we had already done a couple run throughs so I was pretty confident in my role.
I’d say I did a good job at my role and it was actually very fun!
I’d say that it seemed like the hardest part of the performance was for the sound team who had a lot of responsibility because a lot of the noises they had to make were actually made with real life objects! Overall I think this was a really successful project and I think it was a fun and effective way to display our learning on this topic! Here’s our performance bellow!
Thank you so much for reading!