The Rural We: Claudia Catania
The founder, producer and host of Playing on Air, who lives in Hillsdale, has cast about 130 short plays since 2012.
Claudia Catania, Tony Shalhoub and Kristine Neilsen after recording "The Clam" at the Signature Theater, NYC. The recordings done live in front of an audience double as fundraisers.
Claudia Catania is the producing artistic director and host of Playing on Air, which is broadcast across 14 states on the radio, and heard by millions of listeners in its podcast form. She founded Playing on Air in 2011 to share quality theater with the public by recording notable artists in short contemporary plays, and delivering those shorts to the nation for free via public radio and podcast. She moderates a conversation with each short's playwright, director and cast following their takes. She’s been an actor, director, and producer of short play festivals, documentary films and children's theater festivals. Catania lives in Hillsdale, New York, which is where she coordinated and directed Playing On Air episodes throughout the pandemic.
My husband and I got our house in Hillsdale in 2005, and we’ve been fixing it ever since. He started staying there sooner than I did — I was shuttling back and forth from the city for recordings. When Covid hit, we just decided to let go of our apartment in New York. It’s the first time I haven’t had a foothold in the city. But I love Hillsdale. I was able to produce Playing on Air for the last 15 months from here, because all the meetings and recordings were done remotely. Yesterday was our first time back in the studio since March of 2020.
I came up with the idea of Playing on Air at the end of 2010, and spent the next year figuring out how to make it happen. It always bugged me that theater was so expensive and exclusive. It bothered me that it’s a major art form and most people couldn’t name three American playwrights. I thought, something has to be done. I’d be at a reading, and every time the actors would knock my socks off, and that was just with the actors sitting on folding chairs. Why not do the same thing for eight million people?
This was before podcasts, so I had public radio in mind. I put together contracts with the unions and a demo tape. By June of 2012 were on WAMC. We became a nonprofit organization in 2016 and started the podcasts. Now we do both radio and podcasts, and the reach is far greater.
Claudia Catania with Timothee Chalamet and Caitlin FitzGerald recording "Tennessee" by John Patrick Shanley at New York Public Radio.
The genre used to be called one-acts, but now they’re called short plays. Between 12 and 20 minutes are long enough to have it be a real play, and short enough to hold people’s attention. We want them to be entertaining and illuminating. In the conversations that follow, the artists talk about their challenges, which is a way to get more insight into the form itself. Maybe someone who hears that will be more eager to go to a box office someday.
The way we engage the actors and directors varies with each production. I’ve been around for a while, and I do know people. When I like a play, I start seeing certain actors in it. Then I talk to the playwright to find out his or her dream cast. After that it’s a matter of working with everybody’s schedules. Actors don’t do it for the money — they do it to be among their colleagues. It’s like a pickup game with people who are all at the top of their games. I’ve now cast about 130 plays.
Because of Covid, people began working in audible drama, and I think that’s going to continue. It’s good for theater in the long run. I’ve very excited for next fall. It’s going to be all commissioned work, so they’ll all be world premieres.
