The Need:

You need to see Benicia Old Town Theatre Group’s captivating production of John Olive’s The Voice of the Prairie. The play is performed each Friday and Saturday at 8, each Sunday at 2, between now and Saturday, November 12, so there’s still time.

“Why do I need to see this play?” you ask.

You need to see The Voice of the Prairie because a play needs an audience to work. Your neighbors and friends, actors from Benicia and nearby communities, men and women who work on sets and costumes, have put in countless hours preparing this performance that will not become the final, wonderful play that it is unless you, the audience, participate.

Whether a tree falling in the woods makes a sound when no one is there is only important to the birds and squirrels and bears that might be struck dead if they don’t get out of the way, but a play performed before an empty house is dead before it starts.

“But I like movies,” you say. “I can read the reviews online and only go to the ones that I like. How do I know I’ll like this play?”

We all like movies. What’s not to like about the beautiful Kate Blanchett or the handsome George Clooney saving the world on a screen as big as your house? But a movie only cares about your money. When the movie ends and the credits roll, the incongruous sound of clapping, if there is any, is heard by none of the actors, directors, and producers. It’s only your money that counts.

You need to see The Voice of the Prairie because the actors, directors and producers will hear your every sigh, your every laugh or cry. And certainly they will appreciate your applause, for you will clap hard and long. This is a wonderful play that will touch you in many ways.

“What kind of ways?” you ask

I don’t know. After all I’ve explained, that’s a terrible thing to ask. I’m disappointed. Perhaps you should ask Miss Emily, but you don’t know who she is because you haven’t seen the play.

Let’s put it this way: You need to see The Voice of the Prairie because bad things will happen if you don’t. I haven’t written Miss Emily yet about you, but when I do who knows what she will say? If you have hair, it may fall out. If you don’t have hair, it may grow back in the wrong places.

But ultimately you need not worry about Miss Emily or your hair if you see The Voice of the Prairie, a seriously entertaining and intellectually engaging drama performed by a wonderful cast. Take your family. Go with your friends. Introduce your children to drama done on a fine scale. You’ll have a grand time. And you may just keep your hair the way you like it.

The Play’s the Thing:

 Imagine now that it’s 1923. You live in a farmhouse on the prairie in Nebraska or Kansas or Iowa or one of those flat states where the corn grows “as high as an elephant’s eye.” There are some trees planted around your house, old maples planted decades earlier to provide shade in the summer, but none of them are falling, at least not yet, for the wind is blowing as you sit with your spouse inside. As the day’s labor wanes with the setting sun, you sit silent, not talking, for you have already said years before everything that needed saying. And you listen for the voice.

The voice in The Voice of the Prairie, John Olive’s play directed by Casy Cann, might have been this wind whistling through your maples, but it’s not.

In 1923 radio is the new voice, spreading like the wind across the prairies. Legitimate stations, sanctioned by the federal government, with rules and regulations enforced by agents who put scofflaws in jail, are broadcasting with equipment that’s properly grounded, maybe even properly installed by those who know what they’re doing.

But bootleg stations broadcast as well, like Leon Schwab’s KCMO. His transmitter is driven from town to town because the signal is weak. He needs to be close to farmers. He needs to cut deals with hardware stores that sell radios, the magical mystery machines that harvest sounds from the ether. And he needs to fill airtime with something, anything that will keep you in your farmhouse listening and buying radios. Leon plays hillbilly music that he hates. He pays a banjo player with a glass eye a dollar to play for three hours. And he wants to pay Davey Quinn, an Irishman who learned to tell stories from his Poppy, even less to entertain listeners the way he did at the feed store in town.

You sit next to your radio, the brown wooden box connected by a heavy black cable to a car battery out on the porch, for you didn’t want acid leaking acid onto your hardwood floors. The radio, you see, needs DC power. AC is the future.

But that’s not important now, for you, a member of the audience, lean closer as Davey Quinn tells stories about hunger and snakes, about his Poppy’s fears. But mostly he tells stories about the time right after his Poppy died. He was stealing chickens when Frankie, a beautiful blind girl, caught him in the barn as her mother lay dying and her abusive father waited for her back in the house. Frankie and Davey ran off together, but that was almost 30 years ago in 1895.

Their flight lasted only a few months. Frankie’s father, claming he was a reformed man, offered a reward for her capture. On the run, Davey and Frankie were hungry. They were always hungry.  Davey dreamed of “Green apple pie oozing caramel and cinnamon. Ham and redeye gravy dripping on hot fresh frybread. Grits and onion soup.”

Davey sees Frankie’s picture in the newspaper. He’s afraid they’ll be caught. But blind Frankie is convinced that when they’re together, they’re invisible. She wants what she sees to be what they both see and what you, the audience, sees when the house lights go out for that brief-long time.

Sitting in that farmhouse in the audience, you are transported by John Olive’s time machine, The Voice of the Prairie, during a time when radio stars are born, for David Quinn has a talent for telling stories over radio’s ether to no one and everyone as he becomes Frankie through his telling of stories about their journey together.

For the first time distance is falling, is disappearing, as the distant world is brought into your living room.

Davey becomes famous because everyone wants to hear more about Frankie the blind girl. Is she real? Is she still alive? Davey wonders himself if his stories are true until Leon decides to find her.

As the drama shifts between 1923 and 1895, the cast plays memory against reality, remembered stories against lived experiences, like a jazz group playing riffs on a theme, going back and forth, weaving the past into the present, until the intriguing end when prison bars separate now from then. This is when you wonder, in the final scene, with the radio’s microphone casting a mandala shadow on Quinn’s chest, if Decartes should have said, I remember, therefore I am.

This is a funny, sad, endearing and poetic play acted by a wonderful cast that you need to see. Indeed, you’ll be talking about this play long after the curtain falls.

Well, actually, there is no curtain. The set is minimal, suggesting just enough, the hint of understanding to a hungry mind, to tease you along on this dramatic journey. But as David Quinn might say, That’s another story . . .

The Players:

I could say that this actor walks on water, that this other actor was essential to the drama’s success, that those supporting actors were superb, that the director managed to make magic out of a script that seemed complicated because of its interlocking, time-shifting thread, until I saw it performed and finally began to see beneath its surface.

But I won’t say these thing because all worked so well together. All were essential and did a terrific job: Casy Cann, director; Dan Clark as Poppy, Frankie’s father and Watermelon Man; Clinton Vidal as the young and older Davey; Mark Hinds as Leon Schwab; Lexi Hart as Frankie; Vicki Zabarte as Susie and the older Frankie; and Lamont Young as James and the Jailer.

I thank them all for a memorable night, and you will too after you see the play.

You need to see this play!