Sound Profile: Alexander Danner

Alexander Danner is the type of person who finds a way to fit into the spaces that take his fancy. He sits in a warm, yellow office that does not belong to him. He didn’t even know the office share existed until the pandemic. Despite that, he seems perfectly at home. His orange shirt and socks feel designed to fit him into the space, matching him to the painting of orange and pink flowers on the wall as if he had picked out the decor himself. Danner is a pale and lanky man with dark hair who has never seemed to sit properly once in his life.

Danner props his feet over the wheels of the desk chair as he leans forward, analyzing the script on his laptop. It’s an episode for season four of Greater Boston, the audio drama he has been working on since 2016. Greater Boston follows a cast of Bostonians in an alternate reality where a number of incredibly Bostonian and fantastical things occur, such as the Red Line succeeding and becoming its own town. It can be difficult to gauge the success of a genre like audio drama podcasts, one that is still somewhat niche. However, Greater Boston has received glowing reviews from many people popular within the niche, such as prolific creators for the show Welcome to Nightvale, Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink.

Danner’s eyes hover on a snippet of dialogue, highlighted in orange. His left foot shakes as he reads. It’s unclear as to whether he is moving along to the Aimee Mann album he’s listening to because a moment later his feet are planted on the floor. He has found a solution to one of the issues in his script and a short burst of words lands against his keyboard.

In addition to the coffee filling his Writer’s Room mug, there are two things steering the creative life of this man: public transportation and learning. His creative life has been one full of considerable successes. It might not be saying much, but his work has garnered much more positive feedback than most of the actions of MassDOT in the past five years. In those years, Danner has become a jack of all trades in the world of audio drama. He has worked on four separate shows, directed the first United States convention focused on fiction podcasting, and taught classes on the field.

Out of Danner’s body of work, the crown jewel is easily Greater Boston. The speculative fiction audio drama follows the lives of a group of Bostonians following the death of a man named Leon Stamatis and the secession of the MBTA’s Red Line. A large portion of the show Greater Boston takes place in the newly independent city. The choice of this MBTA line was purposeful for Danner. At first, he and his co-creator Jeff Van Dreason considered the Green Line. Then the idea of multiple lines seceding and forming feuding cities. Then the Blue Line. The Orange Line as well. But in the end, the team decided on the Red Line. It helped that both Van Dreason and Danner were living along it while first planning the show.

“The Red Line is kind of just the most iconic line of Boston,” Danner explains, “It runs through the most iconic landmarks. It runs through Harvard Square. It runs through all of Cambridge and Boston proper and all the way down into the southern suburbs. So for hitting the places that would be familiar to most people, it made the most sense. But it also has a lot of Boston history in it. This really became more important in the second season. The way that the red line runs through such segregated cities and how much it highlights the division between white Boston and black Boston. Then, of course, you acknowledge that name, that it is called the Red Line and Boston invented that racist practice of redlining. You know, the metaphor became impossible to not use.”

At first, the only thing connecting the characters is that they all live in Boston. As the story continues, their lives become increasingly intertwined. The convoluted story is organized into a few chapters per episode, each chapter focusing on a different set of characters. One chapter might focus on Charlotte Linzer-Coolidge, leader of Red Line the city, and her wife. The next chapter might focus on the Stamatis siblings grieving the death of their brother.

Before the fictional chapters, every episode begins with a montage of interviews. Citizens from the real Greater Boston area answer questions like, “What’s the weirdest job you’ve ever worked?” or “What’s your favorite historical fact or story about Boston history?” The questions usually feed into the plot of the given episode or a current story arc.

The episode that began with “What’s the weirdest job you’ve ever worked?” follows the character Michael Tate, Leon’s roommate, as he looks for a job. The episode ends with him receiving a phone call intended for Leon. It’s a job offer that Micheal ends up taking. In the following episodes he begins as a copyeditor at ThirdSight Media. In the world of Greater Boston, the company produces several publications about how to predict the future.

The connection between the question and the story isn’t always clear. Sometimes, the interviews hint at future plot points. The episode that begins with the question “What’s your favorite historical fact or story about Boston history?” follows an investigation into a molasses flood that occurs on the Red Line after it becomes a city. The Red Line is still made up of moving trains that take people from station to station, but there are also citizens living and working in the train lines. The molasses flood happens in season one when a Red Line train crashes into a molasses tank. The story is inspired by the Great Molasses Flood which occurred in 1919 in Boston’s North End.

At the center of this zany but heart-felt project is Alexander Danner, and his friend and co-creator of the show, Jeff Van Dreason. The two met in grad school in 2003 when studying creative writing at Emerson University. They pair well not just in audio, but visually, as well. Danner has long hair and tends to stretch out in his seat, while the bald Van Dreason has a habit of hunching over as he considers how to describe his work. They are almost opposites but their differences keep the creative trains running.

The idea for Greater Boston came years after they had graduated, when the two were trying to keep writing while balancing jobs. Both of them were making ends meet through teaching. Van Dreason and Danner would meet biweekly to workshop each other’s writing. Neither Danner nor Van Dreason had an initial interest in podcasting. The first writing that Danner did for the story that eventually became Greater Boston wasn’t even in script format. Van Dreason remembers first seeing the story as flash fiction, extremely short stories that tend to be 100 words or less. At the time, audio drama was mostly a thing of the past century. Its revival was in its nascency; the majority of fiction podcasts were readings of narrative fiction, like the New Yorker’s podcast creatively named The New Yorker: Fiction.

“Audio at that point didn’t seem like necessarily the best match for me because my attention wanders. I have ADHD and it does get in the way of certain types of things. My wife was already listening to some other types of fiction podcasts that I wasn’t familiar with yet,” Danner reminisces, “She’s who introduced me to them in the first place, and the first two were the typical ones. Welcome to Night Vale and The Truth. And t​​hat was a very different experience.” Danner’s ADHD made it difficult to pay attention to one author reading an entire story. But a story with different actors delivering dialogue interspersed with sound cues held him in its grip.

At the time, Danner had been bringing flash fiction to his workshops with Van Dreason. These short stories started becoming scripts, all of them severely unconnected stories. Van Dreason suggested unifying them through a singular location. This has become a pattern in the way the two work. Danner’s strong suit is character, while Van Dreason focuses on structure and unifying the people that Danner builds.

“I suggested making them all in one location. Boston, for example. And then I think I said, yeah, you know I’m toying with this idea of this character who says he’s the mayor of Cambridge. Cambridge has a very complicated mayoral system,” Van Dreason proceeds to launch into a tangent that is equal parts outrage and education about the mayoral situation in Cambridge. This is normal for him. Production meetings get sidetracked by his political takes, although no one seems to mind. All of the production staff are resoundly left-leaning. He eventually returns to the subject of the podcast’s origin and the character the Mayor of the Red Line.

“At that moment they didn’t have a mayor. There was no active mayor, so it was just chaos. So I said I like the idea of someone saying that he’s the mayor of Cambridge, but he’s not really the mayor. And I think Alexander took that as an invitation to create this character himself,” Van Dreason laughs, “He created the mayor of the Red Line and decided that the other unifying thing was it wasn’t just going to be Boston, it was going to be that Red Line.”

The flash fiction became scripts that eventually consolidated into the first season of Greater Boston. This season follows two major plots. The first being the story of the Red Line. Season one follows the referendum campaign that leads to the section of the MBTA becoming its own city. The second major plot follows the impact that Leon’s death leaves on his siblings, his ex-girlfriend, and his roommate.

This season is particularly heavy in narration for an audio drama. It was an intentional choice on Danner’s end. He could not pay the actors, so wanted to minimize the amount of time they would have to give the project. However, he was reading for the narrator. He didn’t mind putting in extra hours because, as he puts it, “I knew I was just going to make myself the narrator and I can make myself work as much as I wanted to.” Van Dreason was insistent that this change. He pushed Danner to include more active dialogue to make the show more engaging.

Finding actors or managing their workload was far from the pair’s biggest hurdle. For all of the time spent writing and studying storytelling, neither of them knew how to edit audio or how to sound design. The earlier episodes of the show were made on GarageBand, a program that comes default with Mac computers. It is a type of software made to edit and produce music, but it was what Danner and Van Dreason had.

“We’ve both learned a lot about sound design, since those first recordings. You can even see the sound design gets much more complex. Over the course of the seasons, just because our comfort and skill level was increasing.”

For a show that is as set-specific as Greater Boston, it made sense for Danner to go directly to the source. The show takes place on the Red Line and it has to sound like it. It couldn’t sound like the New York subway or the L in Chicago. Early in the process of making the show, Danner took a recorder on a field trip. He rode back and forth on the Red Line to get some of the iconic soundscape of that stretch of the MBTA.

“I should do more of that because we’ve been using the same set of sounds for three seasons now and it wouldn’t hurt to have a little more variety to it. not that it’s that bad, it changes that much, but still. It would be good to have another version.” [NOTE: I couldn’t get the original sound files from Danner. There are sections of the show where it is clearly the same background noise, and if I weren’t home I’d be able to make a comparison between two clips.]

While some of the files have stayed the same, the sound of Greater Boston has changed dramatically since the first season. Both Danner and Van Dreason have learned enough about sound design that they have held audio positions on other dramas since the beginning of their own show. Danner attributes his success to pushing himself.

“I wrote a bunch of sound notes in that script, because it starts with the crash and then we get the flashback of what happened. And so I’ve got these sound design notes of the train screeching by, a piece of metal has broken off and is scraping the wall. We hear a flutter of bird wings, we hear a spray of beans and it’s, you know, this completely absurd set of sound directions. Jeff read that and he’s just shaking his head at me. But then, I was like, ‘Man, I get to do that in the sound design. And I’ve got no choice but to figure out how I’m doing that because I set myself up for that challenge.’” [NOTE: Couldn’t get isolated sound files, but the episode in question is here.]

The team is preparing to enter the fourth season with exponentially more confidence than before. Danner and Van Dreason now know what they are doing.

“We worry a lot less about how we’re going to execute various sound things because at this point we just know that we can figure it out whatever it is.”

The learning that goes into the show started long before pre-production ever did. While Danner and Van Dreason work on a show that centers around Boston, neither of the two had lived in the area before school. Both of them are from New York. Van Dreason is from central New York; Danner, from Long Island. Boston seemed to be the perfect place for Danner. There was a program in the city that interested him. His wife was also looking at grad school in the area. Beyond education, there was also the city’s public transportation.

“I knew I wanted to live someplace more urban. I thought New York might be too urban for me, and I definitely thought it would be too urban for my wife. But I don’t drive. I needed a place with a subway. The degree that the subway means to me is…I came here for the subway. It looms large in my life.”

The couple moved to Boston in 2003. By now, Danner is just as well integrated into the area as someone born and raised in Greater Boston. Minus the intense love of the local sports teams. Jeff VanDreason is the one covering that part of Bostonian identity, although Danner is adamant that the Red Sox will be a part of season four. While the fervor for the Sox and the Pats are missing from Danner’s life, he is well aware of many of the moving pieces that make up Greater Boston. In some ways, he seems more aware of the area’s history than those who grew up learning about it on local field trips.

For most mentions of the city’s history, Danner turns gleeful. He almost giggles as he recounts Olive Garden’s misguided attempt to set up a food truck in Boston’s North End. He relishes how he included molasses into season two. One of the few times his face falls serious is when the topic of the history of marginalized communities in Boston is brought up. This also becomes a major part of the second season, which follows different mayoral campaigns in the Red Line. One of the candidates is a black woman named Isabelle Powell, who gets involved in Red Line politics because the housing regulations in the new city continue to push the racist housing legacy of the Greater Boston area. [NOTE: The actress who plays Powell does a great job in the episode where this backstory is revealed. Would like to include an excerpt from the scene between her and her nephew Isaiah where they talk about it. “Your grandfolks sent me to school in South Boston because…” Transcript here.]

A production meeting over google hangouts begins with a review of the writers who have applied to write mini-episodes before the next season. Mini-episodes allow for more voices to be introduced into the world of Greater Boston and provides content for the audience while being less work-intensive than the main season. These episodes are filler while the production staff work on the main plot. Danner underlines the importance of finding new writers, “because we are not uh…” He is interrupted by an energetic producer, Jessica Stillman, “WE’RE ALL WHITE!”

The world of audio drama, compared to other artistic mediums, has a much lower threshold to entry. It takes a phone, a voice, and an idea. All of Greater Boston’s production staff are working other jobs. But because of the grassroots nature of the medium, a team is drawn from one’s friend group.

“When we were casting the first season, you know in our heads we imagined a diverse cast, but then we were casting from our friend group and it was kind of a wake up call as to how white our friend group was. We had no budget. We couldn’t hire anyone and we were reluctant to ask marginalized people to work for us for free.” It was at this point that Van Dreason came up for the interviews that would become the starting point for every episode of the audio drama.

In season two, characters with storylines directly related to racial inequalities and public transportation were added to the story. Danner tries to make sure his actors are comfortable to speak up if anything makes them uncomfortable and has hired sensitivity readers for mini-episodes related to queer identity.

While Danner is eager to showcase more diverse voices in mini-episodes and in future projects, the main season still feels like his and Van Dreason’s baby.

“Jeff and I are still writing the main episodes. The possibility of having more voices in those has come up and it’s not something we’ve, we’ve firmly decided on yet. I’m a little more resistant to that, just because, I mean, it’s been hitting me from the start, like I have no problem like, I don’t know, that’s one of those things that I’m reluctant to change midstream.”

Danner knows he wants his next project to showcase a larger diversity of voices. He wants to run a show in the style of a writers room. He’s confident that he can do that because of his experience creating Greater Boston. At the beginning, he knew almost nothing about what he was doing. And he still feels like there’s more to learn, but that is what is pushing him forward. That, the community he has built, and, of course, the bad breaks on the Red Line.

MULTIMEDIA:

I would like to include audio excerpts from Greater Boston in this article. I couldn’t get raw audio from the creators, so in addition to making notes on where I would like to include audio, I made a map to show the areas mentioned in the article.