Welcome to a Night Vale takeover of Selected Shorts! It starts with a welcome message by playwright Will Eno, “Prologue to Middletown,” read by Cecil Baldwin. Next, Marin Ireland performs Yoko Ogawa’s macabre story “Lab Coats. Cecil Baldwin returns to read “The Beautiful Stranger,” by Shirley Jackson. Dylan Marron delivers a powerful short musing on family and death in “List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers,” by Patricia Lockwood. Levy, Meg Bashwiner, and Dylan Marron showcase the theatre troupe approach that brought the group together in “Go Back to the Telephone Booth, Clark Kent, Clark Kent,” by Sarah Levy. Our final work is by Daniel Mallory Ortberg. His story “Texts from Peter Pan” is performed by Dylan Marron and Mara Wilson.
Just in time for Halloween, Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink, creators of the hit podcast “Welcome to Night Vale,” offer up some of their favorite weird stories, performed at an evening they hosted at Symphony Space. First, “Night Vale’s” on-air personality, Cecil Baldwin, reads a welcome message by playwright Will Eno, “Prologue to Middletown.” Next, Marin Ireland performs Yoko Ogawa’s macabre story “Lab Coats.” The Japanese writer is the author of more than forty works of fiction and non-fiction. This story is from her collection Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales. Ogawa is a winner of the Shirley Jackson award, so it seems fitting that her story should share a bill with Jackson’s “The Beautiful Stranger,” in which an ordinary housewife seems to go off the rails. It’s read by Cecil Baldwin.
Patricia Lockwood’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Tin House, and Poetry. She is the author of a memoir, Priestdaddy and two poetry collections, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. From this collection we feature a powerful short musing on family and death, “List of Cross-Dressing Soldier’s” which is performed by Dylan Marron.
Cranor and Fink wanted to showcase the improvisational theatre troupe that brought them and much of their cast together, the New York Neo-Futurists, so the program features a reading of one of the 4,000 short plays this group has generated, “Go Back to the Telephone Booth, Clark Kent, Clark Kent.” It’s by Sarah Levy, and is performed by Levy, Meg Bashwiner, and Dylan Marron.
Our final work is by Daniel Mallory Ortberg. Ortberg co-founded the website The Toast and has written the books Texts from Jane Eyre (2014) and The Merry Spinster (2018) as well as Slate's "Dear Prudence" advice column. He also hosts the Dear Prudence podcast. His story “Texts from Peter Pan” is performed by Dylan Marron and Mara Wilson.
The eerie music you hear at the top of the show is of course from “Night Vale’s” resident composer Jon Bernstein.
Learn more about Joseph Fink’s new novel, Alice Isn’t Dead, based on the Night Vale Presents network’s other podcast of the same name, here: http://www.nightvalepresents.com/aliceisntdead/#novel
