Behind the Scenes of Wait for the Beep


Commisioned Producers:

Hillary Frank is the author and illustrator of the novels Better Than Running at Night, I Can’t Tell You, and the forthcoming Normal, ME. She is also contributes to a variety of public radio programs, including This American Life, Studio 360, and Weekend America. Frank lives in Philadelphia.


"The inspiration for Weird Little Plan came from a surprise phone call I received from a friend I hadn't talked to in nearly a decade."

By day, Carma Jolly is a radio producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In her time, she's made a lot of documentaries and even won some awards. But when darkness falls, she morphs into an audio art siren who rides the faders without a care in the world.

"The idea for Take me Out is the result of a litany of insincere voicemail spam left on the artist's answering machine. From an alarm saleswoman worried about her safety to a strong and boisterous moving man with a big truck, Carma Jolly has had enough of fake care and concern!"

For the past three years Roman Mars has worked at the Third Coast Festival as the producer of their weekly program Re:sound. Mars moved to Chicago from San Francisco where he was the Executive Producer and Host of Invisible Ink, a literary magazine show on KALW. In 2008, he moved his family back to Northern California (to prospect for gold.)

"I was inspired to produce Debt Collector because the only voice mails I consistently receive are from debt collectors. The calls are always automated, and even though the text being spoken is identical every time, they feel more and more menacing with each call."

Sue Mell¹s radio work has been featured on the Third Coast Festival¹s documentary program Re:sound, Studio 360, Weekend America, and the Peabody Award winning website Transom.org. You can subscribe to her podcast ³Unintended Detours² in  iTunes. Sue¹s script for this project was written in collaboration with her friend Laura Lyons.

"For Baggage, I liked the idea of an object (a rolling suitcase) revealing something about its owner, and of a woman who takes a random occurrence as some kind of 'sign'."

Michael Slaboch is a multimedia artist living in Chicago. His primary creative endeavors involve post-production sound engineering on various radio, television and film productions. He is also a mastering engineer and audio archivist of lost and undiscovered music for the record label, The Numero Group.

Dave Urlakis recently directed Talkback for Steppenwolf as part of Suzan-Lori Parks’ 365 Days/365 Plays Festival. Recent performances include improvising with Swoon and Skeleton Attack at the iO Theater (formerly ImprovOlympic), The Diviners for Speaking Ring Theatre Company, the Midwest premiere of Eat the Runt and King Lear for Vitalist Theatre.

"With Scrape I wanted to write something that was a little dark, a little funny and explored the idea of what people value and how they react when it’s taken or damaged in some way.  It was also interesting to play with the “negative space” of a voicemail play – we never actually hear from the central character whose messages we’re listening to, so how much can we really know about him?"