The New York Times: "Miss the N.Y.C. Subway? These Radio Plays Bring It Back to Life"

Dec. 24, 2020 — written by Christina Goldbaum, photos by Simbarashe Cha for The New York Times

Miss the N.Y.C. Subway? These Radio Plays Bring It Back to Life

A new audio series from Rattlestick Playwrights Theater imagines the bustle of the trains before the pandemic — one story and one station at a time.

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“Taken together, the plays elevate those once ubiquitous moments from the mundane trials of a daily commute that bind the city’s collective DNA.

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Implicit in each vignette are the lofty life questions the playwrights wrestled with as the shrinking of urban life turned their gaze inward: What does a healthy relationship look like? How can you tell when to let go of love? How do we survive a love lost?

“A lot of the inspiration are the unspoken love stories that we pass by as commuters each day,” Contreras said. “We wanted to focus on millennial lovers who are in this complicated space of finding themselves.”

Of course this spring, those connections felt even more distant. With a suddenness as stunning as its deadly wake, the pandemic brought the city to a standstill.

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That is exactly the void that she and Santiago, approached by Rattlestick, set out to fill. In May they enlisted 17 playwrights to craft stories that reflected the people living in the communities served by the stations.

By then, many theaters had moved online, with prerecorded performances and virtual play readings, many of which translated awkwardly onscreen.

“There was no creation of community,” Santiago said. “It felt like we were pretending it wasn’t through a screen, instead of embracing that the person watching online also exists and we can write new plays for a new medium.”

But if intimacy is where those onscreen productions fall short, it is where radio thrives.

The ambient sounds alone can transport a New Yorker into the sprawling underground: The familiar clink-clink-clink of a turnstile grinding forward. The earsplitting screech of a train as it winds across metal tracks. The crackle of a conductor’s voice broadcast inside a subway car.”