FringeNYC 2013: Radio Mara Mara

Review by Loren Noveck · August 9, 2013

There’s the structural core of a fascinating play in Libby Emmons’s Radio Mara Mara, and lots of ideas with potential, but the piece as a whole never takes shape. It sometimes feels like the backstory was constructed with more care than the present-day narrative of the play itself (and despite that, that backstory feels more intellectually precise than inhabited by the characters). The play is set at an NPR-type radio station, now barely hanging on in the wake of political chaos (there was an assassination, massacres, bombings, though the precise nature of the events, and how broadly they affect the world beyond the general area where the play is set, remain somewhat murky). Barely hanging on (and in fact possibly not transmitting at all), the station headquarters are populated now only by two former hosts: Masafumi Yukimoto, who was the DJ of an eclectic, global music program, and is now trying to keep the station alive by programming 24/7, and L’Ansashita Mita, formerly the host of a high-end talk show/interview program where she interviewed not only musicians but global leaders, who’s now trying to archive all her old reel-to-reel interviews onto a computer to preserve them.

There’s no question that the themes being explored here are intriguing, including the idea of how music holds us together and defines us both as individuals and as groups; how culture becomes global; how we use music or recordings or other cultural products to engage with history and memory--and one another. And, in fact, where the play really comes to life is in the cultural artifacts that Emmons has created, drawing in a larger group of actors and musicians than the two who appear onstage: the interview segments that we hear from the archivist’s former program, and the songs the DJ plays. Almost all of the piece is underscored by one of these elements. Most of the music, recorded for the show, is unusual covers of old pop and rap songs, familiar yet completely in a different idiom from the original (whether that’s a rap song refigured as a folk-y ballad or an old Madonna dance-club hit turned into something moody and introspective). We feel like we’re in a familiar pop cultural universe, but tilted slightly askew.

Yet these artifacts too often feel more grounded, more emotionally specific, and more resonant than what’s actually happening in the play before us.  Director Ali Ayala has filled the play with lots of beats in silence, where the two are engaged in their own private activities, and it’s true that the characters are more invested in their own projects than they are in speaking to each other. Both actors (Christopher Burris and Zoe Metcalfe-Klaw) seem livelier over the air than in conversation with each other--which speaks to the ideas contained in the play, but isn’t all that engaging to watch.

Yet even when the DJ and archivist start to open up to each other and share snippets of their histories, there’s something a little over-precise or over-analytical about it; I didn’t feel a real sense of loss about what had happened to their lives or to their world. This lack of emotional specificity also occurs with the history of the place and Radio Mara Mara itself; the world-building is detailed and yet feels somehow generic. The apotheosis of this is perhaps the song “A Song for Calder Square”--I think it’s the only piece of original music in the piece, and it’s meant to be central: an anthem by a fallen hero, about an event that launched the collapse of a civilization. But its lyrics are flat and its melody thin; it’s hard to invest it with the weight it’s clearly meant to have for these characters and this world.

The seeds of a much more fully developed piece are here, but as it stands, it’s more intellectual curiosity than compelling theater.