I try to keep busy. I should also probably try to remember to update this blog more often. Since the last time I wrote something here, a few more audiobooks have come out. The most recent was William M. Kaffenberger, Jr., and Gary D. Rhodes' Bela Lugosi in Person. Before that was Go Entertain's The History of the Royal Navy. Meanwhile, Stewart Giles' novel Smith: A Detective Sergeant Jason Smith Thriller, is going through the formatting process at Audible.com and should be available for purchase shortly.
I've also just finished editing the audiobook edition of my own one-act play collection, The Sixth Victim & Other Plays. Unlike the other books, where I was the sole narrator, this one has a lot of voices connected with it. The first play, The Sixth Victim, is read by Ashton Brammer, as Dina, and Mic O'Halloran, as The Man. That play is set in 1888 London, and The Man will turn out to be Jack the Ripper, running into complications when he decides to take a sixth victim.
In the second play, To Kill a King, O'Halloran returns in three roles, the English Ambassador, a Priest, and an Assassin. I voice King Hamlet, his brother Claudius, and a Guard. Judy Parker is Gertrude. My former Columbus Civic Theater Comedy of Errors castmate LeVana Wu voices Ophelia, and Colton Weiss, who was also in that show with me, is Hamlet, Horatio, Laertes, and Osric. Rounding out the audiobook cast for this play is Harold Yarborough, who voices Polonius and the Chief Counsellor. If all of those characters sound familiar, they should. To Kill a King is a blank verse prequel to Hamlet. A serious one, as it happens, which makes it a bit unusual, most of the other prequels tending to be comedies for some reason. Arguably, this 58-minute play would make Shakespeare's tragedy even more tragic, as it suggests that Claudius didn't really kill Hamlet's father, Hamlet did; Claudius killed his uncle, and the Ghost is a vengeful liar.
In the third one act, Burying Dad, I play Joe, a retired Army general, and Ashton Brammer plays my sister, Mary. This is one of those pairings that only works in an audiobook, or possibly a radio program, where you can't see the actors and instantly realise that one of them is several decades younger that her supposedly two-year-older "brother."
The fourth play, It's the Computer's Fault, is technically a monologue, though any staged version would have two people on stage. It's just that one of them spends the entire play tied and gagged in a chair while the other explains why he's going to have to kill her. Jack Schultz voices Rod, the psychotic murderer who thinks that online personality quizzes are God telling him what to do.
The fifth, and last play in the collection, Sunday Afternoon, relates the story of Dave and Norma, a couple who have been married for 45 years, on a day when Dave is definitely showing signs of losing it. I play Dave, Judy Parker plays Norma, and Ann O'Halloran plays their daughter, Judy.
Most audiobooks are just one, or occasionally two, narrators reading the book. This one, being a collection of one-act plays, has a full cast, more like a radio drama. The complete audiobook runs just under two hours, so if there's a producer out there who wants to put on a J.T. McDaniel short play festival, here's a great place to start.
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