(Foreground: left to right): Christopher Slaughter and Heather Eisenhart (Background: left to right): Ethan Haywood, Andrew Smith, Gavin Stiltner, Ethan Compton, Morgan Stanley, Sarah Trivett, Corydon
Radio drama has often been described as “the theater of the mind.” Like its sister genres, storytelling, reader’s theater and narrative theater, radio drama demands active, imaginative participation from the audience. More than half a century ago, families all across the country huddled together in front of their radios and were transported to haunted graveyards, bloody crime scenes, distant planets and exotic faraway lands.
Christopher Slaughter, associate professor in the King University theater department, started Twin City Radio Theatre to provide a theatrical experience not unlike what a radio studio audience member in the 1940s or ‘50s would have enjoyed. Actors gathered around microphones with scripts in hand and recorded sounds effects and colorful hosts set the mood for the evening’s dramatic offerings.
Since 2009, Twin City Radio Theatre has produced 40 old-time radio dramas featuring more than 150 actors and technicians, including King University students, faculty, staff and alumni, students from other colleges, local high school and middle school students, and community members. Open auditions are held and the community is welcome.
They have performed at the King University Fine Arts Theatre and campus oval, at King University events, such as the Dogwood 50 and Over Breakfast, at annual AARP meetings, at Theatre Bristol’s Art Space, at Java J’s and The Grindhouse coffee shops, at the Bristol Public Library and at Anderson Park as part of the “Haunted Anderson” seasonal event sponsored by the City of Bristol, Tennessee.
Slaughter has worked in radio in one capacity or another since the early 1980s. He started as a student on-air announcer at WVIC at Virginia Intermont College and got his first job as an announcer at WBCV in Bristol, Tennessee. Years later, he served as production manager and faculty advisor for WSKB, the student radio station of Westfield University in Westfield, Massachusetts.
In 1999 he began “The Whip City Radio Theatre” as a companion project to his weekly Old-Time Radio show, “Shock Theatre,” which featured prerecorded broadcasts from radio’s golden years as well as recorded adaptations of classic radio dramas. This collaboration between the mass communications and theater departments ran successfully for six years on WSKB, but the culminating vision of the project, live performances, was never realized.
He moved back to Bristol in 2007 to take a position in the theater department at King College. In 2009, in the absence of a theatrical offering for the fall semester’s Family Weekend, he directed a live double feature of two classic radio dramas adapted from the works of Edgar Allan Poe under the name The Twin City Radio Theatre.
“The Twin City Radio Theatre serves as a perfect entry point for theater-curious college students and community members, as well as theater majors and minors, and since its inception has been a popular annual theatrical event on campus. Radio drama, which shares much with the immediate, primal act of storytelling, is inexpensive to produce, requires a relatively short rehearsal period and tours easily,” Slaughter says.
For the last few seasons, Slaughter has directed the shows and designed live sound effects. King University Theater Department faculty member Heather B. Eisenhart has served as technical director and designed lights and projections, and Adriel Slaughter, a Northeast State Community College philosophy faculty member and frequent Theatre Bristol volunteer, designs costumes.
This year, King student Andrew Smith serves as stage manager, and theater majors Ethan Compton and Morgan Stanley assist with sound and lighting design.
Slaughter also takes care of the scripts. He either writes new ones or transcribes scripts from public-domain recordings. For example, in 2020 he adapted three short stories by Victorian women writers that were produced and directed by KU Theatre’s directing class for the 2021 Dogwood Alumni Celebration as “The Dogwood Radio Mystery Theatre.”
“Our performances embrace a Brechtian production and acting style, making theatrical the conventions and techniques that were hidden from original broadcast audiences. A lot of the fun is seeing ‘how they do it.’
“We’ve built several traditional old-time radio sound-effects devices in our shop classes: a sound-effects door, crash boxes, a doorbell/phone buzzer box, a creaking-door effect and more. We also research and implement the imaginative Foley techniques used by the great sound-effect artists of radio’s golden age. For example, squeezing boxes of cornstarch to create the sound of walking in snow. Even throwing a bag of potatoes can create the sound of a dead body hitting the floor,” he says.
This Halloween, The Twin City Radio Theatre haunts downtown Bristol with“Destination Unknown,”two mind-bending, golden-age radio plays of cosmic terror. “Destination Unknown” is on stage at the Theatre Bristol ArtSpace, Oct. 29, 30 and 31 at 7:30 p.m. and Nov. 1 at 2:30 p.m.
