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A New Audio Miniseries Amplifies The Lives Of Essential Workers And Their Families


In the audio drama series, Isolated Incidents, a United States Post Office employee recounts an experience she had with a customer. 

“I had a guy come in a while back. A mask on his chin. Walking all over the place, all casual. And I said to him, sweetly as I can, ‘sir, can you put your mask on over your mouth AND your nose please?’ He looks around at the empty store and then looks at me as innocently as I’ve ever seen and he says, ‘but there’s no one in here.’” 

Just released last month on the Broadway Podcast Network, the six-part series follows the lives of essential workers and their families. Produced in association with Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, the audio drama amplifies the voices of front line workers who are so vital, but often invisible.

The plays, written by Pascale Florestal, Nicholas Kaidoo, Laura Neill, Jaymes Sanchez and Hayley Spivey, highlight the struggle to keep your wits in the midst of a global pandemic. Yet at every turn life seems to be spiraling out of control. Each playwright wrote one episode and then joined forces to collaborate on the final play in the series as the different characters intersect. 

Directed by Jade King Carroll and Nicole A. Watson, Isolated Incidents was incubated in June 2020. It was a time when, as playwright Sanchez explains, “… the pandemic, that had been going on for a few months, was colliding with racial tensions in this country that have been around for a long time but were really coming to the surface…in response to the murders of Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, and so many others.”

Sanchez and several artists discussed the idea of wanting to create something that spoke to what was happening. A team of majority-BIPOC and majority-queer playwrights were assembled. They came up with Isolated Incidents.

“The series of audio plays gives us a diverse look at all of the different ways that race in the pandemic, intersect, interact and collide,” says Sanchez. “… race affects a lot of things that people of color experience in the United States, especially now as things have been made so much more difficult and dangerous as a result of the pandemic.”

The various episodes delve into issues like dealing with feeling safe in public during a date or worrying about new neighbors. Spivey’s play, In Public, was inspired by her own experiences working at a restaurant at the beginning of the pandemic and how each person she encountered had a different feeling towards safety. “I wanted to have an episode about someone who goes out into public even when it’s well advised to stay indoors, and the social and moral stress that comes alongside that,” says Spivey.  

Florestal’s piece, Monster In A Pandemic, focuses on an interracial lesbian couple trying to adjust to living with a parent/mother-in-law. “There is just so much to unpack and understand of the dynamics of family, and what it means to be in a couple where you’re interracial and dealing with racism that’s happening,” says Florestal.

As Nightmare Next Door playwright Laura Neill explains, “We each landed on our own episode idea, looking at the pandemic, race, anxiety and an attempt to find honesty and honor this moment.” 

For Nick Kaidoo the series really hit home. Kaidoo had family members who continued working throughout the pandemic. “[I] was nursing those anxieties,” says Kaidoo who wrote Mediation. “And trying to think of what we could do with this project, to highlight and illustrate those truths and stories.”

Working on the series was a true labor of love for sound designer Twi McCallum who was solely responsible for sound effects, editing and the final mix of the series. “Now that most artists are back at work, we are still depending on essential workers because we get Covid-19 tested regularly on our productions and we’re sending our children back to school,” says McCallum who just made her Broadway debut with Chicken & Biscuits and is the first woman of color to be a sound designer Broadway. 

“As artists, we all lost work for a year and a half, which came with many emotional and financial struggles,” adds McCallum. “But our essential workers stayed employed and dealt with the wrath of what it meant to be at work during a pandemic surrounded by people who felt inconvenienced.”



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