Second Stage Podcast

Should the play Twelve Angry Men be required reading for high school students, or for law students? The world has moved on from the 1950s and the 1990s, but as we say in my class: people are people are people. What do other teachers today think about adding a play like Twelve Angry Men to our curriculum? Second Stage is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find it and our other podcast, With Hono...

Hadestown is Anaïs Mitchell ’s 2006 musical, and it has been stirring up fires onstage. The play revolves around the ancient Greek myths of two couples: Orpheus and Eurydice, and Hades and Persephone. It reimagines the ancient Greek myths of these two couples in a post-apocalyptic, Great Depression-inspired setting: a train station juke joint between the world above and the mining town below. Her...

This week, we wrap up our July series for America's 250th with American Son , Christopher Demos-Brown’s gripping 2018 drama. The play features two parents (a black mom and a white father) desperately searching for answers after their teenage son Jamal goes missing following a traffic stop. What starts as a search for information spirals scene after scene into a relentless and unsolvable argument a...

This is our 3rd week of July 2026, celebrating America’s 250th on the stage, and we’re rewinding to 1985 and Tony Kushner’s groundbreaking play, Angels in America, Part 1: Millennium Approaches . Second Stage is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find it and our other podcast, With Honors , on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Also, throw some love at our brotherly podcast with Coach Haston...

As America celebrates 250 years of its promise, A Raisin in the Sun asks us to consider whose dreams have been realized, whose remain deferred, and what that disparity reveals about the American experience today. Second Stage is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find it and our other podcast, With Honors , on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Also, throw some love at our brotherly podcast...

For the 4th of July, we’re taking it back to the founding fathers and reconsidering the educational and literary merits of teaching Lin-Manuel Miranda’s insanely successful musical, Hamilton . Second Stage is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find it and our other podcast, With Honors , on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Also, throw some love at our brotherly podcast with Coach Haston, A...

Mark Creter teaches at Tennessee Tech University, and for years he himself was the Theater department. Mark and his wife Jennifer Dotson-Creter have dedicated much of their adult lives to theater, dance, and the performing arts in the Upper Cumberland. This week, he took time out of his day to sit down with me, his former student, and discuss this play that is coming to mean so much to me and my c...

This year I assigned The Importance of Being Earnest for summer reading. And I’m approaching the play as most of our students will: knowing little to nothing about the play, the writer, or what significance we’re expected to get out of it. I'll read it, watch it, annotate it, and then—and only then—do I get to look up some stuff about it. And also meet up with a friend who also read the play to di...

It’s the 1st of June, and June is the month for marrying. Join us for a wedding as we reconsider Robert Harling's 1987 play Steel Magnolias . Second Stage is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find it and our other podcast, With Honors , on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Also, throw some love at our brotherly podcast with Coach Haston, A Deadman’s Books . He’s also on Spotify and Apple P...

This week is Mother’s Day, and we are providing a two-episode gift to mothers everywhere. Two episodes that reconsider the impact, the humor, and the role of mothers in our lives. In this episode, we take a drive with Alfred Uhry’s play-turned-famous-movie, Driving Miss Daisy . I’m joined here by Drew Haston and our school librarian, Jaclyn Broyles. Together we’ll take a drive through whether or n...

It's Mother’s Day, and we're providing a two-episode gift to mothers everywhere. Two episodes that reconsider the impact, the humor, and the role of mothers in our lives. In this episode, we turn our attention to Tracy Letts’s play-turned-famous-movie, August: Osage County . Second Stage is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find it and our other podcast, With Honors , on Spotify, Apple Podcast...

Einstein the Man is a one-act, one-man play written, produced, and performed by Bill Landry. The play undoes the myth of Einstein's untouchable genius and presents him as a folksy person you might listen to at a fireside chat. It's a play that speaks to an America that seems to have forgotten the mantle of discovery, innovation, and space exploration until recently with the Artemis missions. Secon...

Join me and my friend Drew Haston and his mentor, Dr. Russ Witcher of Tennessee Tech University to reflect on what Frost/Nixon reveals about Nixon, about media, and about the strange ways history decides when a story is finally finished. Second Stage is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find it and our other podcast, With Honors , on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Also, throw some love...

On its surface, An Enemy of the People is the story of a doctor who discovers that the town’s prized public baths are contaminated and dangerous, only to find that truth is far less welcome than he imagined. But beneath that premise is a drama about something even more unsettling: what will a community do when the facts threaten its money, its pride, its power, and the stories it tells about itsel...

February is Valentine’s month, and Hannah and I sit down to re-evaluateWilliam Shakespeare’s classic Romeo & Juliet , a story eternal to ninth-grade English. It’s one of those texts that are ubiquitous in high school English. Everyone everywhere reads R&J , and somewhere in our collective consciousness, the two teens seem to represent the epitome of romantic love. But Shakespeare warns us from the...

It’s a new year, and that brings the promise of a new you. But are you able to leave your past self behind, move to a new city, and start a new life, all while still telling the same old lies, continuing the same old habits? The adage says, “You can run, but you can’t hide.” Not in the shadows of half-truths, not in the pretty paper lies. Sooner or later, that ugliness usually catches up to us. Te...

It’s the end of the semester, and we teachers are exhausted, waiting for the week to end, hoping — hoping! — that Christmas Break will finally arrive like it was promised to. And yet somehow, it feels like it’s never going to get here. And we’re just waiting. Waiting. Stuck in this high school wasteland. Occasionally interrupted by intercoms and out-of-pocket freshmen wandering by. Samuel Beckett’...

In this episode, we vacation with the Tyrone family in their one-set, one-day, one-plot domestic tragedy. Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night delivers much of the traditional tragic play: personal flaws that drive us to make bad decisions, blindness that ignores the obvious warning signs, and a feeling of inevitable impotence and inability to change our circumstances. What it doesn’t de...

In this episode, Drew Haston returns with some psychotherapy. He and I take on Peter Shaffer’s controversial play Equus , a show that’s intense in a way that teachers rarely get to touch in the regular classroom. It’s strange, ambitious, some would say pretentious, and yet so full of earnest theatrical weight that we sometimes slipped into the sort of immature joking that happens when two tired te...

I love this time of year. The darker days in the evening, the cold, the need to draw together and warm ourselves. It gives us a chance to discuss the things that matter. In this episode, my former student Hannah Randolph and I step into Susan Glaspell’s Trifles , a small play that holds a surprising amount of weight once you slow down and appreciate the details. What begins as a simple crime scene...

If you could seal up a single day from your old hometown into a time capsule for a hundred years, what would it look like? For some folks, small-town life is not it. The kids I teach, plenty of them want out as soon as possible. But it’s also been my experience that plenty of them stay, and plenty of them that leave come back like swallows to Capistrano. Small Town, USA, isn’t perfect, but it isn’...

The world feels insane and more absurd every day. When I open the news, I’m hit again and again with scandal, affronts, chaos, ridiculous people in charge. When I open social media, I’m agog at the folks I associate with: “You really stand for this? You really want this in your life?! This is the kind of people you really are?!?” When I’m in the classroom, kids spit out gibberish like “Six seven!”...

I was inspired to create this podcast by two, well three, main influences. One is, of course, my co-teacher, Drew Haston, who last year introduced me to the world of podcasting. The second, older influence was my college professor, Dr. Kurt Eisen at Tennessee Tech, who taught literature classes through the lens of plays. It was in his class that I first read this week’s play, and it stuck with me...