CREDITS:

Recorded in Fall of 2001 in NYC at Full House and Harvestworks. Engineered by David Lawson, Dave Weissman, Leslie Lavelanet. Payroll services by CTP. Special thanks to Jeff Block; Gretchen Heldring; AFTRA. Thanks also to Williamson Music; Vasrese Sarabande; Charles Howard; Rounder.

Written, produced, directed, edited and mixed by Christian Baskous.

Special thanks to Marcos Martinez, Claudia Arenas.

AVAILABLE ON CD

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SOME REVIEWS, PLUGS:

KZSU (STANFORD UNIVERSITY)'S PAT BLUE RIBBON:
"It's a radio drama about the "famous latin lover PorfirIo Rubirosa" It's great!! It's a parallel story of the odyssey of PorfirIo "Rubi" Rubirosa who flees a car accident into the sewers of Paris and the tale of Woody Mezmer, a lowly marine biologist in Massachusetts. It has lots of good sound effects and excellent dramatic voice work. And I mean excellent!! And it's funny! ...

ROBERT PATRICK (The Playwright, not the X-Files star)
Well, Firesign Theatre by way of early 70's Robert Altman sound-mix and Illuminati-induced paranoia! What technical expertise! You have a lilting ear for dialogue...

RICHARD HARRINGTON, Harrington and Kauffman
I finally listened to your CD. It's really funny, and heartwarming. I like to think that your radio play and our show share the same kind of quality of hapless characters searching for that which cannot be defined...

JANET COLEMAN, WBAI FM, NYC.
Terrific!

POLY VINYL CHLORIDE, KPFA FM, BERKELEY
"After usually having to tell people the stuff they send is: a. Boring, b. Cliche, c. Godawful , I am extremely pleased to be able to say that your stuff kicks ass! ...

KILLRADIO.ORG'S CHILLROOM HOST DJ BENNETT
"What a well produced, layered deep, professional play Rubirosa is... Tell me, how familiar are you with the old Firesign Theater boys? You've gone beyond even them. This is beyond Beckett's amazing radio plays too. Good work!"

DOUG SINGLETON, Brooklyn Rail - reviewed; July 2004:
...Poet, assassin, playboy, Porfirio Rubirosa speeds through the winding streets of Paris in his silver Ferrari, senses dulled by age and drink, time running out. Over the engine's arrogant purr he cries out…
PORFIRIO:
Beautiful Parisians, come to your balconies
I want to hear once more the hungry castanets…
Look at me!
(SCREEEECH-KA-BOOM!)
The car crashes into a tree and bursts into flame, a fiery, mangled wreck of metal silhouetted in crackling flames. And in a glorious fireball our doomed hero meets his untimely death…or does he?
Splendor and Death of Porfirio Rubirosa, a new voiceplay by New York (cont.) author/actor Chris Baskous, harkens back to glorious radio broadcasts of the thirties and forties like The Lone Ranger ("hi-ho Silver!") and The Shadow ("Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men?"), a time when adaptations of age-old tales, Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Orson Welles' infamous War of the Worlds riveted audiences across the nation. Nostalgic for the art form as heard on FM and college radio in California in the 1960s and '70s, Baskous gathered together a crew of seasoned stage veterans and crafted a good old-fashioned radio drama based on the notorious Dominican diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa. A riff on the title of Pablo Neruda's heroic verse "Fulgor y Muerte de Joaquin Murieta," Splendor has been airing on progressive radio stations across the country (in New York segments can be heard on WBAI 99.5 during the Arts Magazine program).
Rubirosa was famous for his fast living and scandalous love affairs-he was married seven times, including once to Zsa Zsa Gabor, and later to her sister Eva-though his lifelong union was with the Dominican Trujillo dictatorship, to whom he was always faithful. Baskous takes Rubirosa's life and re-imagines him as a sort of transfigured poetic anti-hero. While a student in Paris in the 1920s (which he was), his "Rubi" goes through a rebellious phase where he falls in with Bohemians and in a fever of youthful rebellion cranks out wacky surrealist poetry "versos." Years later, in the final moments before his death in a high-speed car crash (evoked above), Rubi cries out in agony with regret for the poet's life that might have been, and is granted a miraculous reprieve.
In Baskous's sonic weave, Rubi's story plays out alongside a parallel tale of scientist Woody Mezmer's dream journey across America visiting YMCAs in small towns, and the misadventures of a demented Byzantine underground:
Meanwhile, in America, top marine biologist, the lovelorn, nearsighted Dr. Woody Mezmer, cannot focus on his work, nursing a broken heart.
WOODY: She loves me, she loves me not. Damn, I bet Porfirio Rubirosa, the greatest lover of the century, never got jilted by his research assistant!
DR. NAKAHARA: Woody, can I have a word with you. These readings you've been coming up with, they can't be right, you've gone mad. Take some time off, a vacation man.
WOODY: I'll show them! I'll show them all! I'll find all the answers I've been searching for all these years, even if my travels take me all the way to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean!
Splendor is a wickedly bawdy piece of slapstick black comedy chock full of double and triple entendres. Baskous draws from clichés of old pulp spy novels, B-movies, and the cold war intrigues of authors like Graham Greene (The Third Man) writing in the post World War periods. The piece plays like a fantastical fever dream, nonsensical at times, hilarious, filled with post-modern time juxtapositions and barely veiled fart jokes.
Porfirio is led by a mysterious stranger through the sewers of Paris-past outdoor café's filled with Parisians, past foreign legionnaires, past mosaics and
ancient temples with ecstatic virgins. He awakes in the bottom of a leaky boat, (cont.) shanghaied by hooded figures manning oars rowing him through murky waters-Constantinople!
All of Woody's scientific predictions and "underwater signals" coalesce as Rubirosa, fresh off a boat smuggled to America enters his world. Dying, languorously, Rubi recites a last "Testamento," in broken English and Spanish:
PORFIRIO:
To those Students, who always embarrass themselves
In dubious battle, I am leaving my battering ram…
And to those professors, when you excuse yourselves
To defile great books-take care, Ayee!-Do not use these, my pages…
And you, my fat friend Diego Rivera, bombthrower and painter,
Who knew only the tragic unquiet
Of rotten fruit and deranged clowns
For whom, (and no other), I write these verses!
I leave you a dinner jacket that can't cover your body
And miraculous shoes that bless the ground where you walk
Ay! Crying out for the forgotten embraces
Of lovers inflamed and resplendent, redolent of nothingness.
The skies open and a staircase descends, bearing a parade of women-all former lovers-escorting Porfirio to heaven. In a fitting end, proving one man an exception to the rules, the cosmos are altered, as are the fates of Woody and earth's weary inhabitants.
Baskous asserts that the handful of colleagues he brought together to record the two-dozen or so roles performed during Splendor and Death, all veterans of Shakespearean and classical theater, simply had a ball recording the voiceplay. Listening in, one can hear the barely concealed raucous time had by all.

A note from the author: "This is a radio play or "voiceplay" in 12 brief episodes; alternative audio drama, in the modern mock-heroic style. It hit the airwaves in 2003 and - thanks in no small part to the contributions of a superb, inspired cast - it made a spash on alternative radio stations and among the downtown NY Theatre community. In it I've re-imagined the legendary, priapic Latin American playboy and diplomat PORFIRIO RUBIROSA - the greatest Latin Lover of the Twentieth century - as a sort of hero-poet transfiguration character, or modern day Don Juan... While still a student in Paris in the 1920's Rubi - in a fever of youthful inspiration - cranks out a single volume of surrealist poetry. Years later, in his final moments, Rubi cries out for the poet's life that might have been his, and is granted a special miraculous reprieve... This - along with the parallel story of lovelorn Scientist Woody Mezmer's dream journey across America, and the misadventures of a demented Byzantine underground - is the rough basis for the voiceplay SPLENDOR AND DEATH OF PORFIRIO RUBIROSA/ FULGOR Y MUERTE DE PORFIRIO RUBIROSA. It's very funny, and surreal; the cast includes luminaries (artistas luminosos y esplendentes) of the American stage and screen Robert Stanton, Sam Tsoutsouvas, Christian Baskous, Omar Prince and Robin Poley.

This piece played on WOMR in fall of 2003 and since then on dozens of other community, freeform and college stations in the U.S. and Canada. It has been played or serialized as a weekly feature on WBAI, KPFA, WSUM and many other fine stations. The voiceplay runs 34 minutes, in 12 discrete scenes. Thanks for listening in . ¡Que Viva Porfirio!"

CB

This Voiceplay can be heard on the following fine radio stations/shows and webcasters:

Joe Blades Ashes, Paper and Beans poetry and writing show CHSR, community radio in Fredericton NB

WPPJ AM 670 Radio live stream via internet...

THE CHILL ROOM w/dj bennett Saturday nights midnight PST http://www.killradio.org.

WBAI 99.5 FM,NYC

Radio Free Exile,

KHEN FM Salida, Colorado Community Radio on their Tuesday 5pm Poetry and Stories.

Pitch a Fit with PVC, Mondays 11:59.999 pm to 2:00 am! KPFA Berzerkeley CA., 94.1 FM Free Speech Radio.

"THE LONELY&THE DAMNED", w/INGRID SHELTON. FM 90.1 KZFR CHICO, CA

CITR 101.9FM's "Sandbox Theatre" show. sandboxtheatre@hotmail.com.

"Loose Canons" on Vancouver Co-operative Radio, CFRO, 102.7FM

KSUN FM
WRGW
FRO (Free Radio Olympia)
CHSR 97.9
CHMR 93.5 FM, St. John's Newfoundland's Collective Voice show.
WFDU FM - log on to the stream at www.wfdu.fm
KZSU FM - read their review: News and Reviews page of the Rubiriosa Voiceplay Site.
WSYC88.7 FM College Radio For the Unafraid
THE LION 90.7
CIUT 89.5 FM Toronto, Ontario, Canada.Cap'n Dave - Great show, saturday funnies for grown-ups, listen nationally in Canada via channel 826 on Star Choice's National Satellite Network; audible on radios as far away as Buffalo NY, and online anyplace in USA at: www.ciut.fm
WUSM The University of Southern Mississippi,LISTEN LIVE.
Mr. Joe Poire of Provincetown, MA's WOMR 92.1 FM (good station - it also streams), hosts a show devoted entirely to new audio theatre.
KFJC 89.7 FM in Los Altos Ca
abfreeradio 1670AM of Allston, Massachusetts
WTUL 91.5FM New Orleans
KCSB FM
WLZY (Electric Ladyland!) Radio 91.5 FM
WTBU - listen live at wtburadio.org.
www.kuoi.org.
WRCT 88.3 FM (and streaming) from Carnegie Mellon University
KAOS Community Radio 89.3 Olympia Washington
WCLH 90.7 FM Wilkes-Barre/Scranton/Hazleton PA
Portland ME's WMPG
WTPS, Kettle-Moraine Community Radio, 99.7FM
"No Pigeonholes" on KKUP Cupertino, CA., 91.5FM. To quote underground radio historian Chuck Taggert: ".. the last of the old time Lorenzo Milam hippie radio stations."
WXDU, 88.7 Durham, NC
101.5 UMFM, Winnipeg's own Hit Free Radio
WMNF Tampa
Trent Radio, of Trent University in Peterborough, Ont. 250 watts @ 92.7Mhz, 95.3 cable in Peterborough and MP3 Stream via PIPCOM.
Radio Waterloo CKMS 100.3 FM, 95.5 on cable
WSUM - 91.7 FM University of Wisconsin-Madison serialized "Splendor and Death of Porfirio Rubirosa" in weekly episodes on the WSUM Radio Drama Hour.
Brooklyn's microradio station free103point9
MR. RANDOM, (aka Ken Fletcher) KWVA Eugene, OR. 88.1 FM
www.erika.net" freeform internet radio has added the Rubirosa Voiceplay to the playlist.