ISBN #1-60513-068-0
#2010-0009

The Cast

• KEN KASTLE: Early 40s. He wears scuffed cowboy boots, jeans and a fringed leather jacket.
• MARGE KASTLE: Late 30s, red-head. She was once a beauty but is now a bit hard. She wears slacks a western blouse and boots.
• STEVE WEISBART: Tall, slim, 18 year-old with blonde hair, blue eyes, dressed in a suit and tie. He carries a very new suitcase and a school briefcase.
• LUANNE: A young woman of 17 or 19. She’s cute, blonde and has a great complexion. She wears a waitress uniform.
• JOE HASTINGS: A big man, face weathered by the outdoors – the picture of a Texan. He wears a dress western outfit; polished cowboy boots and a Stetson. Incongruously he carries a beat up leather briefcase.
• JAKE: An African American, perhaps mid-30s. He’s the personification of every black caricature on stage or screen. He wears a cap, faded plaid shirt, worn coveralls with one shoulder strap dangling down, work shoes and heavy socks.
• VOICE OVERS: Miscellaneous voice overs or backstage voices making up personalities and commercials played on the air.

Synopsis

In this comedy, the year is 1953. 18-year-old Los Angeles college student Steve Weisbart drops out of college after he’s offered an unlikely job as a disk jockey/announcer at a small town 1000 watt radio station in the Texas Panhandle. This station specializes in broadcasting to passing semis on their way to deliver cattle in Oklahoma, and the town has its share of greed, lust, evangelists, bigotry—and some goodness, too. Steve discovers that not all is as it appears in Freedom, Texas, a name that’s a clue to the town’s past and future.

The Setting

The control room of KVOF-Radio Station, a rundown, marginally profitable station that shows it in its hand-me-down furniture and used equipment. There is a console facing upstage, with old-fashioned turntables on the left and right sides, a circa 1940s microphone on an extension over the desk that’s open underneath, and a cluttered wastebasket on the floor. Behind the board is a shelf with records upright in plain brown slip covers, with a speaker mounted above the shelf. We see a clipboard with paper for making notes hanging on a hook near the desk. A banner on the back wall reads “VOICE OF FREEDOM.” To one side a curtain stretches across an alcove

About the Playwright

Michael Halperin was Story Editor for Universal Television and Executive Story Consultant at 20th Century-Fox and wrote television episodes for long-running, popular TV series. Halperin co-wrote the best-selling award-winning novel for children Jacob’s Rescue: A Holocaust Story (Random House) and wrote Black Wheels (San Val) chosen by the National Education Association as one of the best books of 2005-2009. His comedy, Freedom, Texas debuted in Los Angeles with the Celebrity Staged Reading Series, 2009. All Steps Necessary was commissioned and premiered by Inkwell Theater April 2006 in Los Angeles. The Chapman Group Rep. Theatre, North Hollywood, California performed a staged reading of his drama with music Dancing With William Blake in 2006. His one-character play, Mela, was performed in August 2004 in Jerusalem in commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the founding of Yad Vashem. Halperin wrote and directed his play The Spark of Reason at the Promenade Playhouse, Santa Monica, California, 2008. His one-act plays Freud at Sinai and Poor Timing have been produced on both the east and west coasts.  Visit him online at www.michaelhalperin.com.