A smooth voice akin to the whir of distant highway traffic rumbles: “Hello, listeners.” It’s the voice of Cecil Baldwin, the host of popular podcast Welcome to Night Vale, which centers on a quirky desert town located in the Southwestern United States. It’s a place where dark-hooded figures lurk, a faceless old woman is always just out of sight and dog parks occupy different dimensions.
Think of it as somewhere between Twin Peaks and The Adventures of Pete & Pete. Or, more simply, a place where all conspiracies are real.
Created by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor in 2012, episodes of the fictionalized podcast are released twice a month — on the first and fifteenth — and run just under 30 minutes. It first exploded into popularity in 2013, rocketing to the No. 1 spot on iTunes’ most downloaded podcasts in August of that year. Since then the show has produced 150 episodes, two novels — a third is in the works — and seven (soon to be eight) live shows. Fink’s and Cranor’s production company, Night Vale Presents, expanded in 2016 to include other original podcasts: Alice Isn’t Dead, I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats and Sleep With Me, to name a few.
Their current live show tour, “The Spy in the Desert,” will come to Cincinnati’s Taft Theatre July 13. In a recent conversation with Cranor via phone, he calls the standalone episode a spy thriller.
“It’s about a secret spy that has arrived in Night Vale and nobody can seem to track that person down,” he explains.
Cranor recalls how he and Fink first connected: the theater company New York Neo-Futurists. Both he and Fink wrote for the company’s late-night show The Infinite Wrench, in which 30 plays are performed in an hour.
“When Joseph and I started writing the podcast, we set deadlines for ourselves to say, ‘Well, these episodes will go on these exact dates and we will do this show ad infinitum until we die or retire. And neither of those two things have happened yet,” he says with a laugh. “But yeah, I think the work ethic of the Neo-Futurists was really, really influential on me.”
Guided by the voice of Baldwin, Cranor says Night Vale’s adaptation from earbuds to a live staging is an easy transition.
“It’s about the storytelling. And it’s about your lead actor. Somebody like Cecil Baldwin — we just have so much faith in Cecil because he’s such a good actor, he’s a great performer and has an incredible stage presence. I think the best thing we could possibly do is just get him in front of a mic in front of an audience. And that will stand out. And once we did that a couple times we were like, ‘Yep, we were right. This is correct. He’s perfect for this.’ ”
The more complicated part of translating Night Vale to the stage was finding a way to write the scripts so that they would resonate with a live audience, Cranor says. While they are more or less structured in the same way as the podcast, they write the scripts in a way where Baldwin acknowledges the audience’s presence, be it through meta-humor or asking them to interact with the performance. Aside from Baldwin, Symphony Sanders will perform as Tamika Flynn and Meg Bashwiner as Deb and the Emcee, with other guests.
Perhaps what is most striking about any given Night Vale episode — live or otherwise — is the juxtaposition between heavy, sometimes scary, subject material and absurdist, often existential, humor. That balance, Cranor says, is a delicate one.
“Sometimes, if things get too heavy, I think there’s a feeling of needing to lighten up a little bit,” he says. “I just think about when you go to a funeral, afterward, when you’re around people there’s a sense of wanting to remember the dead. That’s one of the heaviest feelings in the whole world.
“What’s amazing to me about moments like that is how people will then tell funny jokes — some of them even dark jokes. And it always feels right in the moment. And I think I am always trying to find those ways of getting around from heavy to light in storytelling.”
That sentiment is in line with the kind of writing both Cranor and Fink are often drawn to. Cranor’s ultimate hope for Welcome to Night Vale as it embarks on its seventh year? That it continues to have longevity and resonate with its devoted pack of listeners.
Welcome to Night Vale comes to the Taft Theatre July 13. Tickets cost $28-$38. More info: tafttheatre.org.
This article appears in Jul 3-10, 2019.
