Director's Notes – Episode 85

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Hello,

I’m writing to you from the Secret Night Vale Tour Rehearsal Location, in rural New York State, where the touring party has gathered to look at goats and horses, watch the sun move over the Catskills, and maybe even rehearse the live show that we are about to tour around the country.

This episode is a sequel to one of our favorite episodes we’ve done, The September Monologues, which was put out in September of 2014. The monologues were a continuation in our experimenting with the podcast format. We had spent a few years putting together a cast of secondary characters voiced by amazing performers. Why not spend an episode highlighting them in a direct way, outside of the filter of our usual narration?

The April Monologues, a year and a half later, is more directly tied to the main plot than the original episode was. We are again hearing from the same three characters, in the same order, but they have something perhaps more urgent to convey this time.

The story of Chad, started in the last monologues episode and continued here, came from Mara Wilson telling me that she always pictured whispering her lines into the ears of some bro-y dude named “Chad”, and so I decided to write her a monologue directed to the audience she had imagined.

Kate Jones as Michelle Nguyen was introduced in the first monologues episode, and became quickly one of the most fun characters to write for. The rhythm of her lines, and the balance between her hipster above-it-all nature and her deep need to just hang out and be liked is so much fun to play with, and Kate nails the delivery every time.

The Steve monologue for the original monologues episode is something that I wrote very early on, and it helped me understand who Steve was as a character. And then when I heard Hal perform it, I understood even more. Hal brings so much gentle humanity to a character that could so easily be a joke. But Hal refuses to let you take Steve as a joke, and instead again and again shows you the deep kindness inside of the goofy Steve exterior.

Maybe we will do another monologues episode again some day, and maybe it will be the same three characters or maybe it won’t. We didn’t even know we were doing this one until a couple weeks before we started writing it.

Sounds like the group is wrapping up lunch, and we’ll be back to rehearsing our new live show, “Ghost Stories”. If you’re going to rehearse a show about creepy stories, there’s worse places than a barn in the mountains. If you’re coming to one of our shows, see you soon. If not, talk to you again in two weeks.

- Joseph Fink
April 01 ,2016