"The Whirlpool"
New Radio Thriller Based on Real-Life, Ocean Phenomenon

Latest Effort by Grassroots Theater Company Aims to Revive Genre of Radio Mystery Theater

For Immediate Realease
Ocean whirlpools have appealed to imaginations throughout literature. In works like Homer's "Odysseus", Edgar Allan Poe's, "Descent into a Maelstrom" and Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", they have drawn us in. These fictional whirlpool, however, could not exert the dramatic pull they do were it not for a few real-life counterparts backing them up.

Now, Cape Cod Radio Mystery Theater, in its latest dramatic venture, travels to the site of North America's largest true whirlpool. Between Moose Island, Maine and Deer Island, New Brunswick, is an ocean, tidal basin where three currents collide with each incoming tide. It is the breeding ground for the Old Sow and her piglets. Depending on variations in the moon's pull and weather related factors the three currents will converge at slightly different locations within the basin. When they meet over shallow areas, piglets result; but when they meet over a four hundred foot hole, twice as deep as Niagara Falls is high, then a monster vortex is formed, known as the Old Sow.

Steven Thomas Oney, author of the program, founder of the Cape Cod Radio Mystery Theater series talks about where the idea for the Whirlpool came from, "In the mid-Eighties we did a show called "The Buoy", -- a Pit-and-the-Pendulum style radio thriller about a man abducted from his motel room and strapped to a buoy in the Woods Hole Passage. The show was popular and worked so well and was so suitable for radio imaginations that I was hoping for another similar inspiration. When I stumbled upon the not-generally-known fact that a real, sizeable whirlpool exists off New England's coast, I realized it was great fodder for another ocean-based, Poe-style radio thriller. In the process of creating a story that would thrill audiences while teaching them the science and folklore of whirlpools, a love story crept into the script, as did our popular duo, Captain Underhill/Doctor Scofield, (Sherlock Holmes for Cape Cod). So the story rounded out nicely. The cast is exceptional."

Philip John Stead, O.B.E., M.A., F.R.S.L. and former film critic for the London Times, delivers a humor-full opening monologue. David Ellsworth and Wally O'Hara reprise their now-familiar Captain Underhill and Doctor Scofield characters, and Stephen Russell and Jade Rutanen, as French convict and Irish park ranger, play lovers, as if from Longfellow's "Evangeline", that the audience falls in love with. Composer, Mark Birmingham, wrote the imbedded music underscoring, a fully orchestral, symphonic treatment that does for whirlpools what Mussorgsky's "Night on Bare Mountain" did for mountains.