Cloudless: the serial audio version

This one’s been a long time coming: a serial audio version of my play Cloudless, adapted by me, directed by Alison Wong, with music and soundscapes by Stephen Lyons (Fond of Tigers), a cast that includes Carmen Aguirre, Pedro Chamale, Bea Pizano, Carlos González Vió, and Naomi López Morales, and presented by Canadian Stage, debuts this coming Monday, March 1. You can read about it and listen, via Soundcloud, here, on the Canadian Stage site.

Loosely based on real events, Cloudless is a memory play designed for a chorus of voices at once separate and intertwined. Each of its five characters struggles to reckon with the same mysterious incident: the disappearance of two young women during a diving expedition off the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico, an incident that sent the lives of those connected to it in unexpected directions involving secrets, travel, sexual discovery, natural disasters, drugs, spiritualism and emigration.

What began as a measure necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly became an invigorating opportunity to reimagine. The decision to render Cloudless as an audio serial was buoyed by Alison’s inventive structural conceit, its echoes of musical structure emphasizing the play’s islands of solitude within an archipelago of interdependency.

The first five episodes each feature a single character delivering their portion of Cloudless in its entirety (or nearly so). The last episode delivers the entire work, with its weave of alternating voices. In a highly unusual method of generating suspense, the whole is revealed only after its individual components have been laid out.

The above photo is by Laura Barrón.