In the year of the podcast, Kash Goins’ hit play ‘74 Seconds’ is returning to Arden as an audio drama

When Kash Goins’ 74 Seconds … to Judgment premieres Monday as an Arden Theatre-presented radio play, it will the third time the Philadelphia playwright and actor has brought the story to audiences.

The play, in which a six-member jury has been deadlocked for days over the issue of “justifiable homicide,” debuted in 2017 at the Arden as part of a season-long residency for Goins’ theater company, GoKash OnStage. After being reworked — mostly “tweaked,” Goins said — during a subsequent workshop, the play returned to the Arden in 2019.

“I can be a notorious rewriter,” but transforming 74 Seconds into an audio drama that will stream as part of the Arden’s digital spring season meant only a few small script changes, Goins said.

The radio-play format, like drive-in movies, is having a moment, allowing actors to work safely and separately from one another, as in the Wilma Theater’s production last summer of Is God Is, one of the shows whose stage production had been postponed because of the pandemic.

More likely to be experienced on a theater’s website or as a podcast than on actual radio, the format was new to both Goins and director Amina Robinson, a Temple theater professor who also directed the 2019 version of 74 Seconds. (In addition to her teaching and directing, Robinson is an actor, and recently appeared as a guest star in four episodes of ABC’s For Life.)

» READ MORE: Wilma Theater is putting on acclaimed 'Is God Is' as an audio play, recorded from quarantine

“I’ve found more of a love and value of the spoken word” in directing a sound-only version of the play, Robinson said.

“When I directed this before, I was really interested in the stage pictures,” she said. “There were moments in the play that I felt were sort of throwaway moments that we like paced up and would push through to get to what I felt was more of the meat or the meaning behind this particular thing. But when I’m just hearing it, some of those moments that I was readily willing to throw away, I now find that I’m like, ‘Oh, wait, no, I actually do like this in the storytelling.’”

She also likes that it gives the audience “a responsibility to create the pictures in their mind,” she said. “When we go into a theater, and we watch something, we’re seeing someone’s vision of what a story is.” During rehearsals, she only listens and doesn’t watch the actors, and has noticed that “the imagination sort of goes a bit more crazy.”

Directing actors over Zoom, on the other hand, hasn’t been as much fun. “There’s a certain sense of camaraderie and community that’s formed when you’re able to actually be in a room with warm bodies” that’s hard to duplicate virtually, Robinson said. “Audio in Zoom, it’s kind of weird because, in Zoom, the voices can’t really overlap.” So sometimes she’ll miss hearing a line because someone else grunted at the same moment. Other times, she’s had to call a break because someone’s connection dropped.

» READ MORE: Theater at a social distance: But is it even theater if it's Zoom (or Disney+) where it happens?

Goins plays one of the jurors, and acting is where he’s really found the difference between this and the play’s earlier productions.

“What I’m learning is, how much more intense … listening is,” he said, adding that he’s found himself paying more attention to the words because he doesn’t have visuals to work with. “There are lines that … sound different to me coming out of me. So in that regard, I think it turned into this wonderful listening exercise. In the midst of making theater, you strengthen that muscle.”

The play’s title is an allusion to the 2016 killing of Philando Castile, a 32-year-old Black man who was shot to death by a St. Anthony, Minn., police officer, Jeronimo Yanez, just 74 seconds after Yanez pulled him over. The play’s story is fictional, said Goins (who prefers not to spell too much out in advance for audiences), yet careful listeners may hear other such references.

“There are aspects of this that tie to [the cases of] Sandra Bland to Trayvon [Martin]. … This was written before 2020, and now if you ask me, I can say you can see some Breonna Taylor in there, possibly some George Floyd,” he said.

Goins has been kept busy this past year in his day job, working on the sales side of pharmacy benefits management. That work, too, has changed, he said.

“Prior to COVID kicking in, I was doing a whole lot of travel for work,” sometimes as many as four days a week. Now the work is virtual.

“Everything is Webex and Microsoft Teams and building those relationships from a sales standpoint from afar, vs. having the benefit of wowing people with all kinds of charisma in person. [It has] its own challenges, but I’m not complaining,” Goins said, describing himself as “a bit of a homebody and an introvert.”

On the theater front, he said he’s been encouraged by how Philadelphia companies and artists have responded to the challenges posed by the pandemic.

They’ve “had to flex new creative muscles. And as much as everyone wants to get back in buildings, and that’s obviously the goal, to be before live audiences, I’d be surprised if that piece of it that has been now developed just goes away once we’re able to go back inside,” Goins said.

He predicted that streaming and audio plays may be here to stay, alongside live theater, “because you get to do more things concurrently, when you don’t have to share the stage … when you don’t have to try to figure out how to rehearse multiple things.“

Still, if he’d known a year ago what he knows now, “I probably … would have done a lot more writing, I think. It’s not that I haven’t had the opportunity,” he said. But there’s a difference with “somebody saying, ‘Hey, for the next [year], you’re not going to be able to X, Y, Z.’ So going into that knowing, I think, would have given me a different mindset than discovering every two weeks or three weeks or every month that this thing isn’t going away.”

74 Seconds … to Judgment: A Radio Play

Streaming online March 15-28 as an Arden Theatre production. Tickets: $30 per household, $25 per subscriber household. Information: ardentheatre.org.