Four Mondays and a WWLT Recap
4 Mondays is a four-act play from Sunny Bleckinger set in San Francisco in the 1980s that released in 2018 and won an award at the HEAR Now Festival in Kansas City, MO. It can also be heard wherever you get podcasts.
Having listened to this around the same time as Podcast Movement 2018 on a previous episode of the podcast segment WWLT, it seemed prudent to re-listen. At less than 30 minutes per episode and four episodes in total, Four Mondays is like a fulfilling meal after skipping lunch. Everything tastes delicious, but it’s hard to tell whether your appetite is impacting your taste buds. By the end, the listener is left with an unfamiliar aftertaste despite knowing exactly what they just consumed.
Food Metaphors Continued
To keep the food analogy going, let’s say the acts of Four Mondays are the four meals of the day —- breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert. Breakfast is important, but people skip it all the time. Lunch feels rushed most of the time, dinner is relaxing and dessert is sweet.
Director Sunny Bleckinger, who also plays Samuel in the audio drama, is very much a chef when it comes to eliciting positive responses, but neutral emotions in a listener. This may sound like an oxymoron, but responses and emotions aren’t the same things though they are often linked. It’s similar to how music can affect emotions in films. Sad orchestral music can make a scene more emotional or make an unearned scene work on a basic level.
Comedy or Drama
Going back to Four Mondays, people have compared the four-act play to filmmaker David Lynch’s works. While having never seen a Lynch movie, his brand is certainly up there with top directors in the movie industry. One could even call him an auteur if one prescribes to that theory of film.
The overall tone of the piece is very much nonchalant with an undercurrent of a grey wit. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the characters who comprise the bystanders. This group is essentially the chorus from an ancient greek stage drama. Despite how this may sound, most of the members are distinct. The characterization of the woman who sneezes is similar to how Darth Vader’s breathing is as iconic as the Jaws theme. While not on the same level in the popular imagination, the detail adds a layer of uniqueness to both the character and the group where she belongs.
4.5/5 Stars
Links
Radio Public (iOS and Android)
Next Time
Rivers of the Mind (Season One)
Discover more from Audio Drama Reviews
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