“It's like an old radio play, but a little bit more intense,” says Andee Kinzy, the creator of the new fiction podcast Kicking the Bucket. “So we've said radio play, immersive fiction, audio drama... And I knew that this medium created a really new, interesting opportunity that connected to the audience in a way that live theater and film cannot. Because when you really put your headphones on – if you can sit down and listen to the story like that – you are so connected to these characters that you feel like you're one with them. You're experiencing everything that they're experiencing.”
Kicking the Bucket is a comedy/drama that explores aging and end-of-life autonomy (“very heavy subjects,” in Kinzy’s words). It started life as a screenplay called Dolores and Howard Kick the Bucket and went through a few revisions before turning from a film script into a multipart fiction podcast; Kinzy says this medium feels like a perfect fit for the story she’s trying to tell and the conversation she’s trying to start. “I find when I listen to a really good fiction podcast that my heartbeat... I get chills. Like everything is right there in a way more intimate manner than you might feel if somebody's on stage or on film. And this is a dramedy, so you're gonna laugh and cry.”
That mix of comedy and drama was important to Kinzy. “The two characters, the main characters, Dolores and Howard, both have terminal illnesses. So they've decided to take charge of their own deaths, but they're not very good at that. So that is part of where the comedy ensues,” she says. “I know that you cannot have tragedy without comedy. So I wanted to bring in this humor because life is sad and terrible and horrifying, but it's also funny as heck. And so without that humor, I felt like a lot of these stories about end-of-life autonomy or death and dying became too sad and depressing and too hard to watch. So we needed something that gave a moment of levity. It allowed us to breathe, to kind of experience this moment with them without crying all the time. So this story I think is particularly suited for the audio medium because It takes you so intimately into what they're experiencing, and it allows you to live it in a way that is more intimate than something that you might feel detached from on stage or on film. And this way, you get to really start to question what you think [and] how you feel about this. And because it's fiction, you can judge these characters a lot more easily than you could judge a person in a nonfiction piece. You can say, I don't like what they're doing. That's ridiculous. I would never do that. Or you could say, Oh, that's really interesting. I haven't heard about that. Or Should I consider that?”
Conversation is part of Kinzy’s goal with Kicking the Bucket. “We will release it weekly for 8 episodes [and] upon the release every week for 8 weeks, we have partnered with the Austin Public Library… so people can come in all together. We're going to listen to that week's episode and then we are going to have a discussion afterwards as a community group. We're inviting in expert facilitators to help guide the discussion. So we've been talking to geriatric psychologists, to social workers who work with caregivers, or death doulas. We're kind of bringing in all of these people who work in the end-of-life community to help us start talking about a subject that's so hard to talk about.”
'Kicking the Bucket' debuts July 2 wherever you get your podcasts.
