For their next performance, the McLean Community Players will give a stage presentation of a live radio broadcast version of a movie. "And the theater audience gets to be the studio audience, so they’re kind of part of the experience," director Shayne Gardner said.

In "It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play," which will open next Friday, Dec. 11, a cast of just five stage actors play the radio actors who bring to life the movie’s cast of about 40, as they present the Frank Capra Christmas classic to an imagined 1940s-era radio audience. "This is an actor’s dream," Gardner said of the myriad characters per performer.

THE ACTORS also create all the sound effects for the radio show, she said. "It’s amazing how hard it is to make shoes sound like footsteps when they’re not on your feet."

"Some of the things they do don’t look anything like the noise they produce," said stage manager Doug Yriart, noting that the sound of someone walking on snow is recreated by crunching Corn Flakes, while a creaky door effect can be made with a bird call. "That’s half the fun of this show is seeing how things you hear on the radio are actually done."

Gardner said the cast had worked hard to flesh out each of the story’s many characters so that audiences would not get confused as they watched the actors switch from one persona to the next.

"That’s been the main thing for me — exploring the characters behind the voices," said actor John Geiger, who plays radio announcer Freddy Filmore voicing a large cast of characters.

"They have to think differently or they don’t speak properly," said Diane Sams, whose character, actress Lana Sherwood, plays most of the females and young boys in the story, including Violet Bick.

"When they start arguing with themselves, it’s really fun to watch," Joe Dzikiewicz said of his fellow cast members. His character, Jake Laurents, gets to focus on a single role, that of George Bailey, the central character in Christmas tale. Dzikiewicz said his challenge was aging the character from a boy to a man over the course of the show, as well as keeping up with his moods. "He needs prozac bad," he said of the classic’s main character.

For someone of her young generation, the show was not only entertaining but also educational, as it taught her how a radio program was put on, said Nancy Bryan, whose character, Sally Applewhite, plays Bailey’s wife, Mary. "It kind of put me back in the 1940s, so it opened up this whole other era."

MUCH OF THE SCRIPT is taken verbatim from the movie, in which the main character, a generous but frustrated businessman is visited by an angel during a moment of despair on Christmas Eve. The angel shows him what his town and the world would be like if he had never been born, and he realizes how many lives he has affected.

The movie was never copyrighted, Yriart explained, but playwright Joe Landry altered some of the original script for length or to convey scenes that relied on visual cues. And, he said, "There are some interactions you’ll notice going on in the background between the radio actors when they’re not on the air."

"We’re very definitely not recreating the movie," Dzikiewicz said.