Second Stage Podcast

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 not the play still has its chops and whether it’s worth featuring in the classroom.

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 Podcasts

This episode’s music features “Caught in the Middle” by Amarent and “Flea Bop” by Mr. Smith, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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 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 Podcasts

This episode’s music features “Caught in the Middle” by Amarent and “Flea Bop” by Mr. Smith, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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.

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 Podcasts

This episode’s music features “Caught in the Middle” by Amarent and “Flea Bop” by Mr. Smith, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license, as well as an instrumental outro of Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me with Science.” It also features selections from Bill Landry’s Einstein the Man (via Discovery Virginia at https://discoveryvirginia.org/einstein-man), and a short clip from Superman (dir. Richard Donner). These materials are used in limited portions for purposes of commentary, criticism, and educational analysis under fair use. All rights remain with their respective owners.

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 at our brother podcast with Drew Haston, A Deadman’s Books. He’s on Spotify at

This episode’s music features “Caught in the Middle” by Amarent and “Flea Bop” by Mr. Smith, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license

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 itself? This month's guest is Mark Creter, an acclaimed theater professor at Tennessee Tech University. He talks us through the social commentary of this play and how a theatrical work can speak to generations beyond its own time.

Second Stage is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find it and our original podcast With Honors on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Also, throw some love at our brother podcast with Drew Haston, A Deadman’s Books. He’s on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

This episode’s music features “Caught in the Middle” by Amarent and “Flea Bop” by Mr. Smith, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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 prologue: this is a tragedy, not a roadmap for romance! So is R&J still relevant, or can we do better? This week we’re here not to dismiss Shakespeare, and not to blindly defend tradition, but to ask whether the tragedy of the Montagues and Capulets still belongs at center stage.

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, on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, as well as Haston Curation.

This episode’s music features “Caught in the Middle” by Amarent and “Flea Bop” by Mr. Smith, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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.

Tennessee Williams’s classic hit, A Streetcar Named Desire, landed to a thunderous half-hour of applause in its first showing, and it went on to become an American classic. It launched Marlon Brando to stardom. But where is Streetcar nowadays? It’s remembered for its sweaty sexuality and its grittiness. It features macho man Stanley Kowalski (with his bulging muscles and his pushy, bully attitude) forcing himself onto the lies told by his fragile sister-in-law, Blanche — and ultimately, forcing himself onto her. In the end, Blanche’s sister (Stanley’s wife) chooses not to believe her sister because it keeps the peace of her happy household lie.

So, does Streetcar have any space in a 2026 America? Is it too racy, too gritty for current audiences? For parents who don’t want their kids reading such “smut” during junior or senior year? Is it at all socially relevant to appear on community theater stages? This week, Hannah comes back to discuss why this classic deserves a second spin, especially nowadays.

Second Stage is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find our show alongside our other podcast, With Honors.

Also, throw some love at our brother podcast with Coach Haston, A Deadman’s Books. You can find him at spots like

as well as Haston Curation, on Spotify at

This episode also features “Caught in the Middle” by Amarent and “Flea Bop” by Mr. Smith, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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’s classic Waiting for Godot feels exactly like that. That life (exhausting and wearying as it can be) keeps on ticking by. Slugging you occasionally. Throwing rocks in your boot. Hitting you with sudden expenses, damages, problems, and offering no real relief except maybe the people you share this waiting with. Beckett hands over no answers, no prescribed moral of the story. He delivers an absurdist play and lets the two hobo protagonists Vladimir and Estragon do most of the talking for us.

This week, I’m ending the year with my co-host Drew Haston (the Vladimir to my Estragon) by asking if this absurdist work has any room in the modern-day classroom.

Second Stage is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find our show on Spotify alongside our other podcast, With Honors

on Spotify:

Apple Podcasts

on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCweufFHJbylu4tR598SDj5w

Also, throw some love at our brotherly podcast with Coach Haston, A Deadman’s Books. He’s on Spotify at

Apple Podcasts

as well as Haston Curation, on Spotify at

This episode’s music features “Caught in the Middle” by Amarent and “Flea Bop” by Mr. Smith, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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 deliver, though, is any of the expected relief tragedy should capitalize on: there’s no catharsis for our characters or for us in the audience. O’Neill wants us to spend a day in his shoes, living with his childhood family and witnessing the self-destructive nature of our own tendencies. For this journey, I’m bringing in a new co-host who has a great eye and a sensitive ear for just this kind of family dilemma.

Second Stage is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find our show on Spotify alongside our other podcast, With Honors

on Spotify:

Apple Podcasts

on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCweufFHJbylu4tR598SDj5w

Also, throw some love at our brotherly podcast with Coach Haston, A Deadman’s Books. He’s on Spotify at

Apple Podcasts

as well as Haston Curation, on Spotify at

This episode’s music features “Caught in the Middle” by Amarent and “Flea Bop” by Mr. Smith, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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 teachers record on the edge of Thanksgiving break. Still, the play’s mix of psychological depth and raw spectacle gave us plenty to think about, even when we were trying not to laugh at how far it goes. This is the kind of text that forces you to sit with uncomfortable ideas, and talking through it reminded me that the work I do in this classroom is at its best when the conversation feels alive, even if it also feels a little ridiculous at times.

Second Stage is a Free Zone Radio production. You can find our show on Spotify alongside our other podcast, With Honors

on Spotify:

and Apple Podcasts:

and on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCweufFHJbylu4tR598SDj5w

Also, throw some love at our brotherly podcast with Coach Haston, A Deadman’s Books. He’s on Spotify at

and Apple Podcasts

as well as Haston Curation, on Spotify at

This episode’s music features “Caught in the Middle” by Amarent and “Flea Bop” by Mr. Smith, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.