CHICAGO — One would think within the land of Make Believe, anything is possible, even during the pandemic — Make Believe being the Make Believe Association, a 5-year-old Chicago-based storytelling company that produces audio dramas, or “plays for your ears.”
But according to founder and executive producer Jeremy McCarter, it was when preparing to do the second season of production that the pandemic changed the trajectory of how Make Believe told stories. The interactive part of telling stories — recording them in front of a live audience and having the audience discuss the story — came to an end with the pandemic. But instead of shutting down, McCarter said the association doubled down.
“The whole world changed in 2020,” he said. “It felt like the only reason to keep going is to try something that would be more ambitious … try to find a way to make something more collaborative than what we thought we were going to do before.”
The result is “Lake Song,” a 12-part episodic (four-hour) audio drama that intersects with poetry, music, science fiction and politics, and centers on Chicago in the year 2098. The Chicago landscape is now the Republic of Chicago; climate change has altered the land to the point where water is at the center of daily life and living. Threats still abound, but Chicago residents persist, as do cultural mainstays like art and music. The story unfolds through the eyes of South Side siblings Dee and Wade, who are dealing with individual growing pains and shared trauma. Episodes have come weekly since Oct. 12 and will end Dec. 21.
“Lots of stuff these days is adapted from source material, this was the opposite of that. We had no story, all we had was each other — seven of us from our very different backgrounds, we’re going to try to tell a story together about Chicago and we’re going to set it sometime in the future and then everything that came after that is what the seven of us dreamed up over the last two-and-a-half years,” McCarter said.
Not to give spoilers, but there’s references to the pandemic and quarantines, iconic landmarks, the late Harold Washington and Karen Lewis, a golden age in the 2040s, and how the county jail was knocked down and turned into fields to feed the city, a brief end to the long history of the city’s segregation, and a fictional poet named Esperanza that Chicago poet Nate Marshall has embodied with his work. Marshall’s last work with Make Believe was a Chicago-based version of the trickster folk tale character Brer Rabbit called “Bruh Rabbit & The Fantastic Telling of Remington Ellis, Esq.”
“I think a lot of what we were doing with the piece was really trying to think about and almost pay forward what’s important in the cultural life of the city now and what would those things look like in the future,” Marshall said about the fictional poet, Esperanza. “Perhaps I’m biased, but I think Chicago is a really important literary city, especially as it relates to poetry. And thinking about who might that be, who would embody that? That’s where that character came out of.”
Marshall is one of “Lake Song’s” seven co-creators, along with McCarter, Laura Alcalá Baker, Sydney Charles (who voices the Dee character), Mikhail Fiksel (2022 Tony Award winner for sound design), WBEZ journalist Natalie Moore and Kristina Valada-Viars. The series score features Chicago blues harmonica legend Billy Branch, a 2022 inductee to the Blues Hall of Fame.
A cast of 23 Chicago actors round out the creative team, including Edgewater resident Marcus Moore, who plays Wade. He joined the project for the camaraderie, the idea of overcoming something and discovering who you are as an individual and as a community.
“What drew me to Wade was he has some obstacles to overcome himself. I can relate to that because I’ve had to do that in my own personal life, more specifically, because Wade is queer, I am bisexual in real life, so having to find my identity as a bisexual Black man, but also as a Black man, a Black adult, a human being, all of those intersections that I am currently going through myself,” Moore said. “The acting I had in this particular environment was new for me, and I’m really proud of what we created in all of our closets.”
The world-building is detailed and the nuances intentional, according to Marshall and McCarter, as was the feeling of hope in spite of ongoing daily challenges. Marshall said the creators of the series didn’t want the piece to be dystopian, but a futuristic drama couldn’t pretend like climate change is not an issue.
“I think our thought was this is how history happens. Hard things happen, folks find new ways to sort of navigate through it and then time kind of marches on and I think that’s a lot of what we really wanted to do with this piece,” he said. “Whether thinking about things like inequality and segregation and a lot of those structural ills that really govern the way that people get to live and who gets to feel good within the space of Chicago within the space of the U.S., a lot of that stuff does find some resolution in the story, which I think was exciting for us.”
Moore thinks the release of the series was perfect timing given the recent election cycle. A firm believer that things happen for a reason, Moore said “Lake Song” shows people have more power than they have been led to believe, and while we are strong on our own, we will always be strongest together.
“That’s what ‘Lake Song’ is about — chosen family and community coming together and overcoming obstacles,” he said. “I think this project came at an absolutely perfect time.”
Marshall agrees, saying he thinks this may be a time where the temperature can break around some societal, cultural issues and concerns. He said even though this is a fictional Chicago, it’s rooted in real things that people have in common, mainly the city. McCarter said the spirit of this project is so much about bringing voices into the room, mostly Black and Latinx voices.
“There’s been a trajectory to Make Believe, to this point,” McCarter said. “It began as an experiment in collaboration to give different kinds of people a chance to find each other in a very divided city that wants to make that difficult, and ‘Lake Song’ is just the furthest that I think we could think of to push that experiment. It’s nice to feel like there’s room out there in podcast land for a story that is a big swing in the way that ours is. … This is a story about people trying to save their city by coming together and I hope people will stick around to Episode 12 to hear how it goes.”
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“Lake Song” is available free on lakesong.fm, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts and other major podcast platforms. New episodes are released Wednesdays.
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