RADIO PLAY
Written by Nicole Gluckstern, by Estrella Suerte Productions
Melbourne Fringe Festival
At Digital Melbourne Fringe Festival until 22 Oct 2023
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
Stars: **** (4)
Tickets here: https://melbournefringe.com.au/event/the-forever-wave/ $10
This review is published only on this blog. I’ll present a radio review on Arts Weekly on 3MBS on Sat 14 October 2023. KH
The Forever Wave radio play by Nicole Gluckstern, is a beautifully wrought, mesmerising journey through a day in a fictional world, some decades in the future, that once was San Francisco before a great wave submerged that fair city – apart from the very tips of its famous hills.
Gluckstern’s inspiration was Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, and The Forever Wave is similarly populated by eccentric characters. There is no linear narrative plot, but rather a series of narrated scenes set in this waterlogged city.
In lyrical and imagistic language, the narrators seem to stroll this world, introducing the listener to the remaining residents who eke out an existence by scavenging from the water, providing services and sustenance, or simply living in isolation, in garden sheds or houses in disrepair or on top of tall edifices that are still visible above the waterline, such as Coit Tower.
These survivors are from a vast range of cultures, social groups, walks of life, genders and languages. Some deliver food, some deliver babies and attend the sick, while others wait in their isolation for supplies to arrive by boat or to be delivered in buckets attached to fly lines. Others dream of lost loves, some sing or preach. Some live in a house for feral children, or in a community of artists in an abandoned park.
Some mix with other survivors, talking and sharing stories and supplies. Meanwhile, others remain mute, live in isolation. Some do not remember the world before the forever wave while some live in that past before their homes were submerged and their loved ones lost, although those lost souls still live in the thoughts and hearts of the survivors.
The storytelling has a gentle rhythm and slow pace that resonates with the slow-moving water and the silence of a non-industrialised world. Narration and dialogue sit against a background of a soundscape that incorporates lapping waters, music, siren songs, and strange and ordinary voices. This new world comes to life painted in word pictures and sounds. It is a beautiful, lovingly conceptualised and created 90-minute experience.
If you want to experience of Fringe Festival show and you’d like to do it from home, book a digital ticket for The Forever Wave.
by Kate Herbert
Written and Directed by Nicole Gluckstern.
Performed by: Roy Conboy, Jerikka Gamboa, Aaliyah Gilliard, Peter Griggs,
Nathaniel Justiniano, Julia Letzel, Mia Paschal, Krystle Piamonte, Edna Mira
Raia, Patrick Simms, Megan Trout, and Lluis Valls.
Audio engineering by Patrick Simms and sound design by Cliff Caruthers.
Featuring music by Mark Growden and Banda Sin Nombre, and poetry by Roy Conboy.
Estrella Suerte Productions
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