Courtesy Prison Performing Arts
The Golden Record features transmissions that are recordings and re-enactments of short scenes, personal memoir and spoken word previously produced by Prison Performing Arts.
Since its founding, Prison Performing Arts has impacted the lives of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated teen and adult participants through its arts-focused programs. Talented St. Louis-based playwright Courtney Bailey dug through the organization’s vast archives to form The Golden Record, a fanciful pastiche that honors PPA’s continuing work and contributing artists.
Performed by the PPA Alumni Theatre Company and featuring artists with varied backgrounds and experience, Bailey’s framework provides the perfect vehicle for a retrospective: a spaceship hurling through space. This spaceship is reminiscent of The Voyager, which launched in 1977 carrying a “golden record” containing sounds and images depicting life on Earth.
Traveler #1 and Traveler #2 command the ship as they, and the very clever Filberta, a live chicken, float almost aimlessly around the universe. The last known survivors from their planet, their one mission is to send periodic transmissions from the golden record and to listen for a response. They also need to defend their ship from The Rogue Antigone Satellite, which keeps orbiting ever closer to their ship while sending its own unique transmissions.
These transmissions are recordings and re-enactments of short scenes, personal memoir and spoken word previously produced by PPA. The vignettes include haunting recollections of guilt, fear and pain juxtaposed with unexpected humor and the hope that life can get better, even if it takes time. Similar to the content on Voyager’s golden record, the transmissions are not a history so much as a representative collection intended to teach others and perhaps create a bridge of empathy or understanding.
The short pieces are interwoven with affirmative catechisms and randomly spaced and comically quirky new year celebrations as well as increasingly dim memories of the travelers’ lives before confinement to the ship. The cumulative effect is both somber and uplifting, and the allusions to Voyager’s golden record and the impact of long-term incarceration are effectively pointed.
The Golden Record featured the acting talents of Eric Satterfield and LaWanda Jackson, as Traveler #1 and Traveler #2, and Summer Baer as Filberta, a live chicken. Autumn Hales provided the voice of The Rogue Antigone Satellite and Courtney Bailey portrayed The Satellite Puppeteer. Additionally, Julie Antonic, Bailey, Scott Brown, Larry Butler, Sandra Dallas, Hales, Jackson, Katie Leemon, Hazel McIntire, David Nonemaker, Patty Prewitt, Satterfield, Dylan Staudte, Tessa Van Vlerah, and Tyler White perform the live and recorded transmissions.
The acting is solid, even from the less experienced artists, helping the show to resonate on an emotional and social level. The show is also enhanced by effective direction from Rachel Tibbetts, the smart use of sound design by Ellie Schwetye and video and projections by Satterfield and Michael Musgrave-Perkins. While the premise of The Golden Record is imaginatively quirky, the desire to communicate with others — wherever they may be in relation to your journey — is palpable and relevant to the mission of PPA. Playwright Bailey selected moving, thoroughly human stories from the organization’s archives and they are even more compelling when experienced as art.
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