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The Other Celia by Theodore Sturgeon, dramatized by Peter Church

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Download The Other Celia from Radio Project X

Radio Project X, August 2012
 
Recorded live in Toronto, Canada, and subsequently distributed worldwide as a podcast, Radio Project X produces a series of sketches, mock advertisements, and radio plays, designed to fill the gap left in the Canadian broadcasting schedules by CBC's decision to cease producing radio drama.
 
The troupe comprises a variety of talents, including Peter Church, Sean Wayne Doyle, Neil Jones, plus a shifting monthly repertory of performers.  Some of their material is done in the style of spoof radio, resembling the Fitzroy Radio Hour in the UK, that pays tribute to old-time radio while understanding its shortcomings. 
 
"The Other Celia" was dramatized as a straight play: it worked very well as an introduction to Sturgeon's lucid way of writing, most obviously evidenced in the following quotation:  "If you live in a cheap enough rooming house and the doors are made of cheap enough pine, and the locks are old-fashioned single-action jobs and the hinges are loose, and if you have a hundred and ninety lean pounds to operate with, you can grasp the knob, press the door sidewise against its hinges, and slip the latch.  Further, you can lock the door the same way when you come out.  Slim Walsh lived in, and was, and had, and did these things partly because he was bored."  "The Other Celia" imagines a futuristic world in which unexpected things happen, but it is above all a character-study: as Slim becomes obsessed with the eponymous Celia, so does the listener.
 
I thoroughly enjoyed the adaptation, proving beyond all doubt that radio drama is alive and kicking, despite the best efforts of official broadcasters to kill it.