Whether on the train, at work or anywhere else, listening to a podcast is traditionally an experience of intimacy, a quiet period between a single person and their headphones.
But Jonathan Pitts and Tyler Greene—the Chicagoans behind the first-ever Chicago Podcast Festival, which launches Thursday—intend to change that norm. Their three-day festival will feature more than 30 podcasts live onstage at five different venues, all performed in front of hundreds of would-be solitary podcast listeners: no headphones necessary.
“Everyone listens to their podcasts separately, and now suddenly [they’ll be] in a room with all these other people who have the same kind of empathetic connection to the same thing that [they] love,” said Pitts, creator and producer of the festival. “And then that’s just gonna be a really celebratory environment.”
The sentiment behind the shows is that they allow podcast fans to gather in one place and meet each other—”IRL,” as the festival’s website says—to connect with other members of the show’s listening community.
“I think that for the community, it absolutely is a social activity,” said Greene, the festival’s artistic director. “When I say the community, I mean the people who make the show—the hardcore and die-hard fans.”
What’s more, the hosts behind the podcasts will be in the room, too: real-life faces attached to the disembodied voices listeners are so used to hearing. Some will even be around after the shows so attendees can meet them and ask questions.
“It’s almost like—and I just thought of this, so I don’t know if it actually applies—but I went to go see ‘Kinky Boots’ at Broadway in Chicago, and I had been listening to the damn soundtrack for, like, six months,” Greene said. “And even though it wasn’t the soundtrack cast, there was something about hearing those same songs in context and in person that was really, really special.”
Pitts, who co-created the Chicago Improv Festival nearly two decades ago, said the idea for a podcast fest first came to him in the hectic days leading up to the 2015 improv festival.
“I was in the office, and all of a sudden I was just thunderstruck by this idea like, ‘We should do a podcast festival,’ ” Pitts said. “And it struck me the same way that 20 years ago the idea of doing an improv festival struck me.”
He bought the URLs for the sites that same day and made plans to meet with Greene soon after. Right away, their partnership had an ideal chemistry for creating and curating a podcast lineup. Though each has a fairly different job—Pitts is a comedian and spends a lot of his time on the improv festival, while Greene works on podcasts such as “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” for WBEZ—both describe themselves as having deep interests in theater and storytelling.
“There are a lot of ways that we’re artistically bilingual,” Pitts said. “Improvisation and unscripted stuff is my forte. I’ve done enough of everything else that I know how to be able to talk in other artistic languages and disciplines. And Tyler has the exact same thing, which is exactly why I think this is a good collaboration, because there are certain areas in which our previous areas cross over, and then there are other areas where there’s not crossover, but there’s enough shared ideas. It makes it stronger to have that multidisciplinary artistic approach toward something like a podcast.”
One of their chief concerns in curating the lineup was diversity—whether that be through media market, type of show, show size or anything in between. Though you’ll see big-name shows like “Filmspotting” and “My Favorite Murder” on the headlining lineup, Greene said he deliberately avoided choosing too many programs from major podcast networks like Earwolf or Maximum Fun. That way, attendees have a chance to get exposed to lesser-known shows alongside their old favorites.
“The ease is inherent in creating a show like this, just the act of turning on a recorder and releasing audio to create a really amazing set of circumstances for people to create original work,” Greene said. “I think the most important thing is that these podcasts have a really good-sounding experience … but perhaps just on the same page is that we do provide a diverse selection of shows for people to attend.”
Although curating podcasts around a theme for each venue was a near impossibility—Greene said the lineup had to be switched up at least four to five times as shows dropped out or were added on—sometimes the programming lined up in a way that was almost serendipitous. On closing night, the podcast “Open Ended,” which comes from the Postloudness network dedicated to voices of queer-identified people and people of color, will perform at The Promontory in Hyde Park. Afterwards, the new Earwolf show “The Room Where It’s Happening,” which centers around the musical “Hamilton,” will take the stage. For Pitts and Greene, the two are naturally complementary.
“I mean, I think everyone is kind of obsessed with ‘Hamilton’ right now, so hopefully that will bring a new audience to ‘Open Ended’ in a way that I think only a live audience can do,” Greene said. “You can see the show you’ve never heard of before, dig it and then go talk to [“Open Ended” hosts] Cher [Vincent] and James [T. Green] after the show while everybody’s geeking out about ‘Hamilton.’ It’s almost a perfect double bill in that way.”
They’re hoping that the marriage of different podcast communities in instances like this one will bring people together in ways they never expected. Pitts called it a “unique celebration,” a chance for listeners to bask in the opportunity of seeing their most beloved shows live while also discovering new favorites.
“It feels like an honorable thing to be able to do artistically for other human beings,” Pitts said.
Above all, the duo is waiting to see what the audience thinks about the way the festival is run. Their input will be instrumental in determining what it will transform into in the years to come.
“I’m really interested for the moment when Tyler and I look at each other and go, ‘Oh, that’s what this festival is,’ ” Pitts said. “Right now the perception is that the festival belongs to me and Tyler, because we’re the ones that have been working on and producing it. But when all of the podcasters and all of the audience shows up, suddenly it’s no longer our festival. It’s theirs.”
@EmmaKrupp1 | ekrupp@redeyechicago.com
