Listen to the first of three radio dramas by US producer Jonathan Mitchell that blur the boundaries between reality and fiction
Today we're launching a new series of radio dramas called The Truth. They're made by the American producer Jonathan Mitchell, but they're hopefully unlike any other kind of audio fiction you've heard – not least because part of the point is that you're encouraged to believe they are real. They're dramas that play with the boundaries between reality and fiction, made-up and real-life, asking: 'what if ...?'
The series was commissioned by American Public Media, one of the US's main radio distributors. His piece Moon Graffiti, the first one in the series, imagines the conversation between Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong if things hadn't gone to plan with the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969. Jonathan discovered that President Nixon's advisers, realising that there was no physical possibility of rescue if things did go wrong, had prepared a speech to give to the American people just in case the astronauts were killed during the landing attempt, or were stranded on the moon's surface. The speech was filed under the eerie title 'In the Event of Moon Disaster'. Mitchell spent a month reading and researching – biographies, transcripts, academic analyses and he made his two actors do the same. After that, he took the recording and started to write a script. The team came together again for another session, and it all came together in the edit.
Although Mitchell says he gets support from his editors – and, of course, his actors – he's a bit of a one-man band: from conception to composition, recording to post-production. Mitchell is hoping to turn The Truth into a regular series on public radio in the US, a medium which features very little radio drama at present. American Public Media has provided seed money to develop an hour-long pilot, and a campaign to attract grassroots support for the series will launch next month.
The Guardian is running three of Mitchell's pieces over the next few weeks. Moon Graffiti comes first; next week there'll be – appropriately enough – an anti-Valentine's day piece; and the week after that we'll feature a drama that explores the anxieties of coincidence. Enjoy!
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