The Beaten Path

A noir series by William Thomas Berk

A desperate carjacker in a hardscrabble town chooses the wrong car to hold up, leading to an uneasy alliance, secrets revealed, and bigger stakes than anyone could have ever guessed. 

Recorded over two days, during live recording sessions broadcast to YouTube and now available to listen to at any time on the Pulp Podcast. 

See links to every episode and an interview with show creator William Thomas Berk below.

The Beaten Path is the new serial series by The Pulp Stage, a hard boiled crime drama. We talked with the writer of The Beaten Path William Thomas Berk to give us the lowdown on what it’s all about.

To see the entire 9 episode series, see http://tinyurl.com/thebeatenpath

Q: Your play series is called The Beaten Path. Tell us about what the story of it is.

A: Broadly speaking, The Beaten Path is a crime thriller between two characters who have to learn how to work together while maintaining a healthy distrust of each other.

Q: When The Pulp Stage presented the idea of writing a serial series of plays, how did you come about this gritty noir concept?

A: All the way back in 2015 -- when I was only just getting started as a playwright -- I was driving home from a Pulp Stage performance, cruising down the freeway in the dead of night, and I got this vision of two people in a car. It seemed like a fantastic setting for an audio drama, so I got home and wrote out the first chapter. And I couldn't find any way to expand it to a full-length play no matter what I did, so I tucked it away in my hard drive.

Flash forward to 2021, when Matt came asking for ideas about a series of short plays. I dug that first chapter out of storage and spent the next year working with the writers and readers of the Pulp Stage, figuring out how to finish the story.

Q: Was it a challenge to develop your idea within the austere Pulp Stage presentational style? A full-length story told with no costumes or props or action and a limited cast. An action packed story at that.

A: There were definitely some action scenes I had to leave on the cutting room floor. Still, the visual of an armed standoff between two characters is so simple and so compelling, all I had to do was mention a pair of guns and the audience's imagination would do the rest. Also, because the characters distrust each other so much, they had a convenient excuse for explaining plans and actions out loud.

Q: How did your initial idea evolve in the Pulp Stage workshopping process? Was there anything that was a surprise to you? Anything that came out just like you intended from the start ?

A: I had no idea what this story would be at the outset. This was all a process of listening to my test readers and incorporating their feedback with regards to what they wanted to see or expected to see. Whole chapters had to be thrown out and rewritten from scratch because of some change in direction. The entire supporting cast was invented because the test readers wanted new ways of keeping up the tension.

In the earliest reads for the first chapter, I remember constant praise for how the interplay between Driver and Passenger was so dynamic and volatile, and the effort of keeping up those checks and balances between the characters came to define the entire play. I distinctly remember one point when it dawned on me that the characters' secrets are their most valuable currency -- the writing process really took off from there.

Q: Your cast includes Pulp Stage veterans Colleen Socha and Jonathan Hernandez. What do they bring to their roles? 

A: Jon is a fellow contributing writer, and Colleen moderated many of the test reads. They've both been heavily involved with the development of the script from the open, and they've read almost every draft. They already knew these characters and the story inside and out long before we ever started recording. 

Driver was always intended to be a character who could go from "harmless suburban family man" to "cold-blooded killer" and back again on a dime. (Breaking Bad was frequently mentioned in the test reads as a frame of reference.) We need to see that Driver does indeed have a soul, he's just trying to keep it locked away someplace cold and quiet for the purpose of this mission. I already knew that Jon could handle charming and unassuming, but he played the darkness and inner conflict of the character better than I could've dreamed.

Colleen was always my first choice to play Passenger. She so perfectly embodies the reckless attitude of a rebellious teenage girl without ever losing the heart that makes the character sympathetic. She and Jon acted superbly off each other, each of them capable of tapping into the characters' trauma.