"Have you ever had a wonderful dream -- or a horrible dream, for that matter -- and it leaves you with the feeling that you absolutely must tell someone about it. But when you try, you can't ?" One of the characters in John Olive's The Voice Of The Prairie wonders if that's what life is. For it isn't only our dreams, but also our real lives that are made up of wonderful as well as sad -- even horrible -- events. Our fullest appreciation of them sometimes depends on finding just the right words to describe them: a gift of the imagination that makes our reality rich with detail.
The Voice Of The Prairie is about a few people whose lives intersect. Thanks to the imagination of the play's author, the intertwining of these characters is made more vivid by genuine theatrics: three actors play all of the various characters, and they do so on one small set that represents locations from Kansas City to Mountain Home, Arkansas. Their adventures -- some of them extraordinary and others very simple -- slowly come together to form lives that make sense to them. Good storytellers have always been able to find just the right words to connect threads of detail for their listeners, weaving those threads together into a satisfying ending. In this play, all of the characters try to tell their stories to each other, but it is one bit of real magic that pulls the threads together. One of the characters calls it "the magic of the ether" because, originally, many people believed it had to do with some magical properties of our atmosphere. They were partly right; it was Radio.
In 1912 a 15 year old wireless operator was working for the American Marconi Company at a wireless telegraph station on Nantucket. He received news through his headphones that the R.M.S.Titanic had struck an iceberg. For 72 hours the operator stayed at his listening post and received the names of survivors as they were rescued by a neighboring ship. Several years later, his company having been purchased by a new and larger conglomerate, this same operator was now in New York and in the employ of the new Radio Corporation of America. The young man's name was David Sarnoff. In a memo to his superiors he made an audacious suggestion.
"I have in mind a plan of development which would make radio a household utility. The idea is to bring music into the home by wireless. The receiver can be designed in the form of a simple 'radio music box' and arranged for several different wavelengths which should be changeable with the throwing of a single switch . . . . "
It was an idea Sarnoff had already pitched to his supervisors at the American Marconi Company, but they had ignored it. His new bosses at RCA decided the idea should be pursued, even though RCA was founded as a wireless communication service and this new idea would necessitate building radio receivers in mass quantity and convincing ordinary citizens to buy them.
Pitchmen streamed across the country. They set up simple transmitting equipment in small town shops, sometimes only for a few days. They scrounged records and coaxed from the townspeople whatever live entertainment they could, and urged those who picked up the transmission to tell their neighbors about what they heard. The radios sold for as little as $10.00 in the local hardware or department store. There were few able entertainers for the new medium, but even fewer laws regulating it. By 1922 RCA's income from the sale of home radios was three times greater than its revenues from its primary function as a communication service.
This play brings together one of these traveling radio salesmen with a rural bachelor whose boyhood adventures roaming the countryside with his first and only love provide a wealth of romantic tales to charm radio listeners across the Midwest. This imaginative play has been staged throughout the country since its debut in 1986. The New York Times praised it saying, "the play has its own staying power; a lingering quality and a shimmering way with words.", and The Los Angeles Times called it "...a deft and witty valentine to a pioneering spirit and to the value of words...It's fun, it has a knowing heart and a voice which should delight all within earshot."
Click HERE to see Gerry Kowarsky's St. Louis Post-Dispatch review of our production of The Voice of the Prairie
Click HERE to see a what KDHX's Steve Callahan had to say about our production of The Voice of the Prairie
Click HERE to see what Bob Wilcox of the River Front Times had to say about our production of The Voice of the Prairie