[dropcap]W[/dropcap]elcome to Night Vale, one of the most downloaded podcast series in the world, is currently touring with a live stage show, coming to Dublin later this month at the Olympia Theatre and the Sugar Club. Created and written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, Night Vale is “a scripted fictional podcast that takes the form of community radio from a small desert town where things like ghosts, angels and aliens are day-to-day parts of life”, Fink tells tn2. Fink and Cranor have been working together in theatre and publishing for the majority of the past six years: “We’ve all come out of theatre — Cecil [Baldwin, who plays the radio announcer and main character Cecil Gershwin Palmer] is a trained stage actor who has performed in multiple national tours in the US. This is a world we know very well, and a live Night Vale show is something we treat very differently as theatre. We are very aware of the energy of the script and the pacing of the script. Cecil is somebody who is very very good at controlling the audience, he’s a performer who can feel the energy of the audience and bring it up if it needs to go up, or bring it down if it needs to go down. We just go into the mode of theatre, and treat it as theatre.”

The podcasts are produced by Fink’s own independent publishing house, Commonplace Books. Their website maintains that, “It is a better time to be an artist than any other time in history.” However, we’re accustomed to hearing the complete opposite — it’s harder to get noticed, to get published, and to make money. “It’s not the easiest time in history to be an artist and it’s definitely not the most profitable time,” Fink explains, “but it is the best time because of the gatekeeper-less worldwide distribution that the internet allows; you can make something that maybe only appeals to a few other people and share it directly with those people, wherever they are in the world. It’s an amazing time to be an artist, you can collaborate with people all over the world, you can share with people all over the world. The most important thing is that art has become this worldwide community rather than something that you have to get a large corporation or, if you go further back, a rich person to be a patron, you don’t have to get those gatekeepers to notice you anymore.”

 

Speaking about the position podcasts occupy in the current cultural landscape, Fink says, “I think they are definitely growing in a big way. People like audio, there’s always a place for audio, because people aren’t always going to have the time to use their eyes and hands to interact with the media that they have at that moment. In the same way that you can watch television by streaming whatever individual thing you want to watch, podcast has been doing that for a long time with audio. Instead of turning on the radio and just seeing if it’s something you’re interested in, you can find the very specific and sometimes very niche thing that you’re interested in and listen to it on demand. I think it’s something that is continuing to grow as a medium.”

Night Vale can be seen as part of a long tradition of eerie happenings in small town America, following in the vein of television series such as Twin Peaks and The X Files, and Fink observes, “Certainly it is written as very American, and the mythology it’s working with is very American mythology — the mythology of deserts and UFOs and the specific types of conspiracies we’re working with are all very American ones. A lot of our political satire and a lot of our satire of advertising is all very based on American politics and advertising.” Fink and Cranor are fascinated by conspiracy theories, and in the world of Night Vale, conspiracies are accepted as true and normal. Fink himself has credited his childhood love for and obsession with conspiracy theories as a driving force behind the series, “I tend to really like the ones that are more human-based. I’m very interested in stuff like the whole Area 51 conspiracy theories, and conspiracy theories about number stations are fascinating, you know stuff that points to these vast, human bureaucracies and intricate networks, they make for interesting stories.”

The series is frequently described as “Lovecraftian”, yet Fink has in the past said that he “hate[s] Lovecraft, both personally and for his writing”. Lovecraft’s writings on the insignificance and irrelevance of mankind in the face of cosmic horrors have, however, been very influential on modern horror and sci-fi. “It would be hard to argue that people don’t use his ideas,” Fink acknowledges. “But I would argue that people use his ideas better than he ever did. It’s one of those things, you know, he did it first, but first is not the same as best, or even interesting.”

Night Vale often avoids giving any physical description of the characters, as Fink believes that what a character looks like is “completely uninteresting”: “What’s interesting about a character is who they are, and who they are has absolutely nothing to do with what they look like. Ultimately, a character, from a writer’s standpoint (and it’s a decent way of reading too), a character is what they say and do, and most importantly it’s how they react and interact with the world and with other characters. That’s what defines character and whether they have brown hair or blond hair or no hair is just not very interesting. When I read a book, if the author starts getting into a long physical description, I tend to just skip past it, because even as a reader I’m just not that interested in it.” Despite this, the show has developed a very creative cult following, with a wealth of cosplay, fan art and fan fiction. “I think what’s important is that they’re interactive with each other,” Fink explains, “They’ve built this community and they share their art and their stories with each other and they discuss theories with each other, and none of that has gotten into the show — we try and make the show just the same way we’ve always made it, we tell the stories that are interesting to us. So the important thing with social media is that it’s allowed fans to talk to each other and to build this community that is related to our show but ultimately it’s not our show and it’s not something that we own; a fan community is something that belongs to the fans.”

One of the most “normal” elements of the series is the narrator Cecil’s relationship with Carlos, a handsome scientist who has come to Night Vale to conduct mysterious experiments. When asked about the overwhelming fan response to the gay romance plotline, Fink recalls, “We wrote that plot just because it’s what made sense for the characters, it was a very organic thing, and it didn’t really occur to me how anyone would react to it. But I really think it’s become a thing that is important to people.” He feels passionately about representations of diversity in popular culture, and continues, “It’s really important for people to look at a piece of media and see somebody that is like them, especially if that’s not the kind of thing that often happens to them with media. That’s a very powerful thing, to look at a piece of media and see someone who is like you and realise that stories about people like you are interesting. The actor who plays Carlos, Dylan [Marron], and I’m gona very badly paraphrase this but he says this much better than me, he talks about being told that he would never play the romantic lead in any sort of show because of his race. What he says is, that’s someone telling you that your love story isn’t interesting, that people like you, your love story is not the kind of love story that people want to hear. So when those love stories are being told, that’s very powerful for people in a way that we never anticipated, but that’s something that I’m glad it happened.”

There are now 54 installments in the series, but the live show is Fink and Cranor’s touring script, which has never been put online: “This particular script we’ve performed over fifty times. So it’s one that we’ve really honed and rewritten. It’s called The Librarian, it’s about a librarian — which in Night Vale is a very dangerous monster — getting loose in Night Vale and the results of that. I’ve now seen fifty-something audiences react to it, and I’ve never seen an audience not have a good time with it.” With one date at The Sugar Club already sold out in a matter of hours, Dublin is certainly extending a warm welcome to Night Vale.

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Welcome to Night Vale will perform at The Olympia Theatre on October 16. Tickets €20.90 including booking fee.