Production archive
The Voice of the Prairie
2005 season · Production archive
Adjust your dial for the reopening of the Denver Victorian: John Olive’s lyrical The Voice of the Prairie follows Frankie, a blind girl, and Davey as they capture the hearts and minds of America in 1923, as told by the born storyteller David Quinn in the early days of that new invention — radio. A heartfelt slice of Americana, the play shows the power of storytelling “through the magic of the ether.”
- Written by
- John Olive
- Directed by
- Terry Dodd
- Ran
- September 9 – October 16, 2005
- Cast
- Arthur Goodman · Harry Cruzan · Katie Paxton · Alex Hill · John Rael · James Nantz · Terry Ann Watts
About the production
This was the first production of the Wood era and the play that reopened the house after five dark years. The choice was pointed. The Voice of the Prairie is a play about a man who talks a room into seeing things it cannot see, which is more or less the working condition of a seventy-five-seat basement stage with no fly tower, no wings and an audience close enough to read the actors’ hands.
Olive’s script moves between 1895 and 1923 and asks a small company to conjure the whole American middle. At the Vic that was done the way it had been done in the room since 1911 — with light, voice and the audience’s willingness to meet the stage halfway. The run set the pattern for the six years that followed: mid-century and contemporary straight plays, small casts, long runs of weekend performances, and a house that made intimacy a virtue rather than a limitation.
What the press said
“…a fine cast of players…spinning a terrific yarn around its audience’s heart and back… lovingly directed by Terry Dodd”
Where it sat in the season
It was production 1 of 3 in the Vic’s 2005 season. It was followed by Appliance (Oct 20 – Nov 19, 2005). The full year is set out on the season calendars page, and every production the theatre staged between 2005 and 2011 is indexed in the production archive.
The house’s standard pattern was Friday and Saturday evenings at 7.30 with a Sunday matinee, over a run of six to eight weeks. With seventy-five seats, a full eight-week run put roughly 1,800 people through the room — which a 500-seat theatre does in four nights, and which is the single fact that explains most of what the Vic chose to programme.
This page is part of the production archive of the Denver Victorian Playhouse, a seventy-five-seat theatre in the basement of a northwest Denver house that staged its last performance in 2011. Details here are restored from the theatre’s own records as they were published at the time; press quotations are reproduced with their original attributions and nothing has been added to them.