Kechi Playhouse adds history to radio play performance

Misty Maynard’s first foray into writing a radio play was more challenging than she expected.

“You’d think it would be this fun little thing, very easy, very quick,” the artistic director and founder of Kechi Playhouse said and laughed, “It’s been insane.”

Maynard is not only adapting George Bernard Shaw’s classic play “Pygmalion” into a radio version, she’s accompanying it with the news of the day in 1940 London.

“The name doesn’t attract people, I don’t think, because people don’t realize that’s the ‘My Fair Lady’ story,” she said of its musical version. “I knew it was a story that had been proven to be appealing for people and one that would be familiar.”

“Pygmalion 1940: A Radio Drama” opens this weekend.

Keeping with her unofficial theme this summer of works that don’t need royalties – thanks to an uncertain audience count with construction going around the theater – Maynard wanted to contribute one of her own works.

“I had looked at stuff I had done and thought, ‘I will just die if I don’t find something different,’” she said. “I thought this might kickstart me into doing something.”

Her biggest task was cutting down the cumbersome five-act play into a manageable length.

“We had to really cut it down to the bare, bare bones,” Maynard said.

“It’s not the story from the musical, it’s very different. You don’t see (Henry Higgins) training (Eliza Doolittle) at all – ‘The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain,’ or puff on a candle or anything like that,” she added. “It goes from her asking to be trained immediately to her going out and trying to have a conversation in upper society.”

Maynard set the radio version on a specific date: Sept. 5, 1940, just before The Blitz bombing campaign by Nazi Germany against the United Kingdom.

“It’s an odd duck, because this particular show, I’ve set it in London and that seemed right to me,” Maynard said. “I wanted to set it in the heyday of the radio shows, which was the ‘30s and the ‘40s.”

A bomb hit the BBC Broadcasting House at that time, she added.

“When I found out a bomb went off, I thought, ‘This is too good to pass up,’” Maynard said.

Although she has directed several radio plays for Kechi Playhouse, Maynard said writing it was a challenge, including characters frequently referring to each other by their names.

“You have to alter it with the thought that nobody’s seeing this, they’re only hearing it,” she said. “The show just began to take shape on its own.”

“PYGMALION 1940: A RADIO DRAMA”

When: Sept. 5-28; 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays

Where: Kechi Playhouse, 100 E. Kechi Road

Tickets: $17 Fridays and Saturdays, $16 Sundays, from 316-744-2152