Show Response: Radio Man

by Tess Walsh

This is a play about a twenty-one-year old girl named Helena and her fourteen-year-old sister. Seven years ago, an explosion destroyed the natural world. The sisters have been camping in what’s left of a national park for the past month after an instance of sexual assault sent them on the run. The little sister, prophetically named Mary-Grace, is obsessed with a voice in her handheld she calls Radio Man, who quotes Robert Frost and dwells on the doom all around him, not necessarily that of the ecological disaster, but more so of the loneliness it has produced. While he lists his woes, another young woman, Vera, approaches the sisters’ camp seeking a bandage. She stays for two weeks. What happens in the time the three of them spend together can only be described as earth-shattering, both literally and figuratively. 

This is a play about a miseducation. To watch the consequences of any miseducation is always soul crushing to an extent, even if set in a world that has moved past what we consider today to be knowledge. Still, the fable that Sarah Groustra has carved out of a trope that will continue to be apt until it becomes our reality borders on the biblical, and speaks to our general struggle to successfully teach younger generations how to navigate the environments they’ve been forced into. 

There is a moment at the play’s climax during which we come to believe that love and intimacy may still be possible in this landscape, a moment where things stand still and maybe won’t move anymore. But then they tragically do, and we’re back on the run. I can't put into words what happens during this breaking apart, in an attempt to both not spoil the plot and to honor the sanctity of it, but: it changed my perspective of the piece entirely. Shortly after this shift happens, you wonder why you didn’t expect it with everything that had led up to it, and then you realize that you had developed the same hope that the girls in this play had come to know and cherish, even if for a short time. The feeling this play’s end leaves you with is one that sticks around for a while, one that forces you to look back at a fourteen-year-old you and wonder what they would’ve done with the knowledge they had in a world that refuses to give them anymore.

Radio Man was presented as part of the 2023 SheNYC Festival at The Connelly Theater. Learn more about Sarah Groustra here.

Photo by Danielle DeMatteo