Tunnel Runners takes listeners on a podcast journey through Toronto’s hidden chasms
iPhoto caption: The cast of Tunnel Runners. Photo by Aza Jin.
What lies beyond the curve in a TTC tunnel? Rats? Likely. A secret society? Just maybe.
For those tempted to go spelunking and find out for themselves — better to pop in your earbuds and press play on Tunnel Runners, a new seven-part original audio drama from CBC’s PlayME podcast. Launching October 30, just in time for Halloween, PlayME is a thriller that whisks audiences into the subterranean labyrinth of Toronto’s subway tunnels.
The cast — a who’s who of Toronto theatre including Tony Nappo, Gabriella Sundar Singh, Peter Fernandes, Dan Mousseau, Jeff Yung, and Marcia Johnson — is a thrill all its own. They lend their voices to the story of a sixteen-year-old boy, Cam, who runs away from a troubled home life into Toronto’s underground, where he encounters a hidden community: The titular Tunnel Runners.
Laura Mullin and Chris Tolley, the creators of PlayME, are the dynamic duo behind Tunnel Runners. Their research for the series took them on a deep dive into “places where people live in the subways and sewers underground,” said Mullin in an interview. She and Tolley learned about “kids who have been released from orphanages in Romania and grew up in the subway, and people living underground in Las Vegas and parts of Asia. In New York people used to live in the subway,” she continued.
Though Toronto may not have a subterranean community in real life, “there’s definitely a whole infiltration community,” Mullin shared, referring to people who try to gain temporary access to off-limits parts of the city’s tunnel system. “We spoke to somebody who does that,” she said. “They gave us lots of information about entry points that you can use to get in, though they wouldn’t tell us exactly where.” The TTC uses these areas to facilitate repairs, route diversions, and staff training. Some sections, like the lower platform at Bay Station, are popular filming locations for movies and TV shows like The Handmaid’s Tale.
“It’s amazing to think that there’s this whole world happening right underneath your feet,” said co-creator Tolley in the same interview. “You don’t think about it. [The underground is] a place where people can live out fantasies, face fears. All these things can happen right underneath the city, and we have no idea. We’re just walking to work or going to school.”
Mullin pointed out that these underground networks can also be metaphors for the ways cities fail to meet peoples’ needs. The increasing visibility of “homelessness and mental health [crises], and the floods we’ve had in Toronto, have opened up a lot of [conversations] that have been buried in the city,” she reflected. “That was something we wanted to explore: this metaphorical world under the surface of things.” The underground community in Tunnel Runners is made of folks that Toronto has abandoned, in one way or another: “largely disenfranchised youth,” said Mullin, “who feel that they don’t have a future.” Their fictional world mirrors Toronto’s real-life deficiencies when it comes to supporting houseless folks; even the city’s plans to add over 500 new beds at shelters this winter falls short of the current demand for space.
With such an evocative setting, Tolley and Mullin had to figure out how to conjure Tunnel Runners’ sinister underground through sound alone. That might be a limitation to some, but for these experienced podcasters it was an opportunity.
“Everything is within your imagination,” said Tolley. “You can create fantasy worlds, frightening worlds, small spaces, large spaces, all with a few simple sound effects. It’s very different from theatre sound design, which is supposed to be almost invisible.”
In audio drama, added Mullin, “you have an unlimited budget for the set and costumes, because it’s all created through sound.” Tolley leads the sound design of the series, while Mullin leads the scriptwriting process. “I can write what the dynamic of the scene is, but it’s Chris’ job to fill in the colours,” she said.
The pay-off for Tolley — and the listener — is in the details. “Even something as simple as how someone walks into a room,” he explained, “sets the tone for that character. Somebody who is excited and has a secret that they want to tell is going to walk into a room differently than someone who has to give bad news.” There are also “little signatures [for characters] that you can play with that are very simple, but can just send a chill up your spine.”
Tolley sometimes goes to great lengths to achieve those chills. “There was the idea that this [one] character wore chains all the time as part of their outfit,” said Mullin. “Which is lifted from somebody in Romania that [we learned about in our research.] I said to Chris, ‘I really want this for this one character.’ Chris has all this heavy chain in his basement. It looked like he was in some sort of torture chamber every time [he recorded], trying to jingle it!’”
For the attentive listener, Tunnel Runners’ sound design also contains “lots of little Toronto Easter eggs,” teased Tolley. “If you listen closely enough, you can hear actual subway announcements from different subway stations around Toronto, and [other] sounds that are very specific to the TTC.”
PlayME has been crafting quality audio dramas for listeners in Canada and beyond since it launched in 2016. Most of its offerings have been audio-only versions of previously produced Canadian plays, often with the original cast as voice actors. Tunnel Runners is the podcast’s first wholly original series since its Quarantine Chronicles in 2020, and it’s been almost 20 years in the making. In 2005, Gregory J. Sinclair, the former executive director of CBC Radio Drama, “hired us on a one-page pitch to write for a series he was doing about urban myths,” explained Mullin. “We pitched Tunnel Runners [as a stand-alone episode], and we got to write this radio drama and go to the CBC. It was our first introduction to anything in audio drama, and it was like boot camp.”
Sinclair won’t be able to hear the new, multi-episode iteration of Tunnel Runners. He passed away unexpectedly in April 2024; the PlayME team paid tribute to him in a recent episode. “He gave us that chance,” remembered Mullin. “Not only did he hire us as writers, but he gave us this immersive experience of getting to see how to create an original audio drama from the writing, to the acting, to the table talks, to the foley. We wouldn’t be doing — not only Tunnel Runners — we wouldn’t be doing PlayME had we not had that experience.”
Tunnel Runners launches on all platforms October 30, 2024. You can learn more about the project here.
Nathaniel Hanula-James
Nathaniel Hanula-James is a multidisciplinary theatre artist who has worked across Canada as a dramaturg, playwright, performer, and administrator.
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