Podcasting Hacks

Produce Great Audio Theatre

Write stories, build scripts, and produce audio theatre for segments of your podcast.

When we think of radio theatre, we imagine the classics such as “The Shadow” and “The Lone Ranger,” shows from decades past when there was no television. Today’s audio theatre is far more diverse than these shows were. We have audio books in which a single narrator plays several parts. We have shows such as This American Life (http://thislife.org/) that tell personal stories through clever use of narration and music. And we have plays set as audio theatre with full productions. These are popular in Britain, where the BBC presents full productions of drama, comedy, science fiction, and more.

Audio theatre provides you with a new outlet for your creativity and a new way of expressing complex topics through storytelling and parody. What’s better is that you will be able to do it all with the audio setup you already have for your podcasts. All you need are some inspiration and enough writing skill to put together a script. From there, you use the three key elements of audio theatre—dialog, sound effects, and musical cues—to tell your story in a way that engages listeners.

This hack concentrates on small, five- to seven-minute productions that you can integrate into your podcasts. In radio, these are called sketches, and they are held as separate constructions from the unstructured portions of the show because they are scripted and are produced in advance. They involve up ...